Posted on 02/06/2023 3:04:00 PM PST by ConservativeMind
Many people are unaware that some antidepressants (medications used to treat people living with depression) are also being prescribed to treat certain chronic pain conditions.
One in five people experiences chronic pain in Australia and globally, and treatment of chronic pain is often suboptimal, with commonly used medicines having limited or unknown benefits. The use of antidepressants to help manage a person's pain is on the rise, even when they do not have a mood disorder like depression.
An international team of researchers has found that some classes of antidepressants were effective in treating certain pain conditions in adults, but others were either not effective, or the effectiveness was unknown.
The review examined 26 systematic reviews from 2012 to 2022 involving over 25,000 participants. This included data from 8 antidepressant classes and 22 pain conditions including back pain, fibromyalgia, headaches, postoperative pain, and irritable bowel syndrome.
Serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRI) antidepressants such as duloxetine were found to be effective for the largest number of pain conditions, such as back pain, knee osteoarthritis, postoperative pain, fibromyalgia, and neuropathic pain (nerve pain).
By contrast tricyclic antidepressants, such as amitriptyline, are the most commonly used antidepressant to treat pain in clinical practice, but the review showed that it is unclear how well they work, or whether they work at all for most pain conditions.
(Excerpt) Read more at medicalxpress.com ...
I asked him, “Are they trying to make you happy about being on the ground?”
Interesting
Too bad about those pesky side effects. Like shooting up the workplace, killing your own children and suicide.
How bad pain is, in the doctor’s office’s scale of 1 - 10 is really subjective, it depends on one’s tolerance for pain. I’m constantly in pain, thus chronic and be damned if I’ll take an anti depressant for it. This day and age of a drug for this, a drug for that and a person’s system will be so messed up it’s pathetic.
Years ago before the medical profession teamed up with big pharma to be constantly pushing drugs, many people just dealt with it and got on with life.
Now TV adds are just flooded with all the prescription meds, some admit a 35% greater risk of death, and people still go for all they can. Proof is those taking the 5th covid shots.
Sorry for the rant, but fewer meds are better meds. Don’t be a pansy, learn to live with mild pain.
“learn to live with mild pain.”
To each his own: I’ve been on many ADs over the years for pain and it was no big deal, as long as I complied with a strict titration schedule to get off some of them without a discontinuation syndrome occurring.
bkmk
The safest most effective severe pain treatment is narcotics. When it comes to side effects and end organ damage nothing compares. The only two side effects constipation and dependency can be managed. Tricyclic antidepressants help with pain, muscle relaxation and sleep. A friend of mine went through two months of degenerative spine pain with only Motrin. It almost wiped out her kidneys and didn’t control her pain. Treating severe pain with SNRIs and all their brain-changing side effects is just what’s needed to give these poor souls the energy to off themselves.
Duloxetine cured (did not just relieve symptoms) my chronic sciatica. It did not help my neck pain. In the beginning, I had reduced the dosage because of side effects and after a couple of weeks the pain started to come back. Raised the dosage and it eventually disappeared. After a year on the drug I gradually reduced the dosage and no more sciatica.
“I have a pain.”
“Here’s a pill.”
Will it never end? (rhetorical, re the idiocy)
At a lecture I attended a few years ago at an American Psychiatric Association conference, they stated that emotional and physical pain folliws the same neural pathways.
Thus taking a pain killer for physical pain also works for emotional pain.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.