Venting the Pain

One of life’s most conflicted relationships is the one between a pain patient and his or her medication. Issues of reliability, dependence, and the compromise of side effects dominate the decision to take medication. Most pain patients consider medication to be a necessary evil, with a trade off between excruciating pain on one hand and alertness, mental clarity, and smooth gastrointestinal functioning on the other.

In addition to the unpleasant side effects of most pain medication, there is the social stigma of taking addicting substances. Often family and friends are opposed to the patient’s use of narcotic medication for fear that the person will become a drug addict. Medications like OxyContin, morphine, and methadone have often been in the news, and their very names conjure up images of down-and-out street drug users. Therefore, it is very important to understand the distinction between physical dependence and psychological addiction if you are to make an informed decision about taking pain medication.
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When a person is injured, family and friends rally around to offer sympathy, encouragement, and help with physical tasks. Everyone, including the patient, expects that this amount of assistance will only be needed temporarily, and that when the injury is healed, life will return to normal for everyone involved. But what happens when the injury results in longstanding pain and physical impairment? Or what happens when a person is diagnosed with a pain-causing condition such as degenerative disc disease, fibromyalgia, or migraines? If there are no crutches, casts, bruises, or bleeding to indicate that something serious is going on, bystanders usually assume that all is well. One of the most difficult features of chronic pain is its invisibility.
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Finding a doctor for the illnesses that we know of and hear of everyday is usually not too hard. So when you hear someone has a headache, you know that typically if you take a couple of aspirin it will go away within a certain amount of time. If, however, that person has a very intense head ache or migraine then he or she might need to lie down for a while, take more then the usual does of aspirin, and, after sometime, it does go away. So what if the pain doesn’t go away or if it is so frequent that you need to see a specialist? Well the first place your family doctor will send you is to a neurologist. But herein lies the issue: a neurologist is a specialist, and for him to admit that you need more help then what he can provide isn’t likely to happen. Since headaches / migraines are not easily treatable when aspirin doesn’t work, doctors move to different types of medication like anti seizure medications that take time to work. In our experience with the medications that take time to work, the doctor wants to see if after ninety days you had any relief.
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