I’m not looking for medical advice, but more understanding. I have chronic back pain. I can alleviate it completely with only 2 things - alcohol and a heating pad. Ibuprofen lessens it but it’s still present. Muscle relaxers do nothing (which makes sense because it’s not muscle related, it’s spinal disk degeneration).
A tall glass of whiskey makes my back relax and I can move normally. Once it wears off tho, it’s right back to tense and painful.
Because you’re not taking the good pain meds.
I’ve lived with chronic back pain for 20 years, and I have 3 stages of medication I go through (though mine is alignment-related, so muscle relaxers help): aleve (the only OTC painkiller that touches my back pain), tramadol (moderate-strength opioid, can’t take it for long or it causes plumbing problems), and tizanadine (the serious industrial-strength muscle relaxers; knocks me out for 8 hours and usually fixes my back the first time.)
If you’re looking for alternatives, THC helps somewhat with my back pain, but I dunno what’s legal where you are.
Tramadol is quite nasty to come off as well because it functions like a combination of SSRI with opiod effects on your brain. I think it’s the mu-opiod receptors as opposed to the normal opiod ones so more similar to kratom in that respect too.
Yeah, tramadol is weird because it makes you not care about stuff. Which is kinda good because it makes you not care about pain, but also, ya know, the other stuff too. But it was quite easy for me to come off of honestly; I didn’t shit for a week and that was more than enough to make me stop taking it regularly. Now I take it maybe once or twice a month at the outside.
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I believe it is like long term use of months or years which can be bad when coming off because it can feel like stopping anti-depressants at the same time as stopping opiates.
I am familiar with the constipation from those types of meds too. Not pleasant!
Oh, yeah, probably. I only used it regularly for like a month or two, 3 pills a day, so it wasn’t so bad for me.
Meds don’t fix back pain
Depends on the back, and the pain, and the meds. No, they don’t fix the underlying issue, but for circumstances where the underlying issue can’t be fixed they make it a lot more tolerable.
True, but relying on the drugs is generally a bad approach
I take it you have some better approach than relying on medication when my back pain becomes incapacitating? Cause it’s not fixable, I’ve seen numerous doctors about it over the years, not to mention chiropractors, physical therapists, etc. My choice is to take pain meds when things get bad or to just be incapacitated for the rest of the day whenever it flares up. So if you have a better approach I’m all ears, but just saying ‘drugs are bad mkay?’ isn’t terribly convincing because so far my experience has been that not relying on drugs is all downside.
you know one thing about social media that’s really hard to deal with is that everybody seems to speak an absolutes about every single fucking topic on the planet. there’s room for the gray in almost every conversation that has ever existed and people like to just point out well what about my special circumstance, of course there’s room for special circumstances and other things why does everybody think everything is absolute?
Except I was doing what’s called ‘speaking from experience’, which means I was speaking about my experience. Which you then decided to weigh in on as if you know a damned thing about it, or me, or even pain in general compared to the four specialist doctors I’ve seen on the subject. So yeah, when you start slinging vague opinions and generalizations about something I have lived for 20 years I’m gonna have some shit to say and you’re just going to have to accept that I speak in absolutes because I am the authority on my situation. If you have any actual experience or expertise to share on the subject then I’m all ears, but if all you want to do is whine because somebody knows more than you do about the nonsense you’re talking than you do then I’m gonna go do something more productive with my day.