Painkiller-Induced Pain

                                                                                         

If you’ve taken painkillers for longer than a couple of weeks, you may have noticed that the dosage you were originally prescribed became ineffective. It’s well-known within the medical and scientific community that the body builds a tolerance to opioids and therefore needs more of them as time goes by. So no one thought that needing more painkillers was anything unusual. But scientists recently discovered that there was indeed something else going on - the painkillers themselves may actually be causing your pain.

There have been several studies done that have verified this phenomenon, and it’s becoming more widely known and accepted. A couple of weeks ago the issue was explored on the TV show House. A patient was put through a rapid detox procedure to get him off painkillers and they hoped he’d be out of pain once the drugs were out of the system.

For this particular patient, it didn’t work. However, the writers of the TV show can’t be expected to be up on all the latest techniques or do full medical research – although they’re at least on top of things enough to know that painkiller-induced pain is real – and they made several mistakes in depicting how you would get the patient off the drug.

First of all, rapid detox is an incredibly dangerous and painful procedure. It’s supposed to get drugs out of the system quickly but is so painful the patient has to be under general anesthetic. Otherwise, they really wouldn’t be able to take it.

The procedure is also very damaging and debilitating. It takes many people take weeks or months to recover.

In the House episode, the patient wasn’t in good enough shape to put under general anesthetic so the procedure was done without it. Truly excruciating. And the doctors made up their mind within hours (during which the patient never stopped screaming) that their theory of the cause of his condition – painkiller-induced pain - was incorrect.

In the real world, the chances of this patient’s pain diminishing under those circumstances were virtually impossible.

To really find out painkillers are causing pain, it would first of all be necessary to go through a proper detox – which takes several days or a week but can be relatively painless if medically supported. However, at that point the patient has simply gotten through withdrawal – the body is not fully rid of the drugs and it will take some time to accomplish that.

Also, because opioids suppress the release of endorphins, the body’s natural painkiller and ‘feel good’ chemicals, it might also take some time to get the body’s endorphin production back in full swing after the detox. Without that, even the tiniest pain, which one could normally live with without painkillers, is exaggerated.

It’s unfortunate that the TV show might have made some people think that painkiller-induced pain is not a real phenomena, or that to find out if it was a situation with them they’d have to go through many hours of excruciating pain.

On the other hand, the House episode may well have made millions of people aware that painkiller-induced pain does exist. And they might think twice about taking them in the future or, if they’re already taking them, they may be inspired to find out if they can live without them.

In fact, a good addiction treatment center can help you get off painkillers so you can either get out of pain, or look for other methods of treating your pain that will not eventually turn against you or cause you to develop a prescription drug addiction.

About the author:
Gloria MacTaggart is a freelance writer that contributes articles on health.

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