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Elavil is terrific for chronic pain and transforms restless, shallow sleep that never goes into the REM stage into deeper, restful sleep that does. Most of the body's healing and long-term memory are done during REM sleep. People with multiple myalgias often do not get that good sleep, and so their perception of pain is markedly worse than normal.

Once you have adjusted to Elavil, it is a great pain management tool. It also helps to even out mood. Chronic pain makes a person irritable or depressed, or both. It is very rare to meet a truly cheerful person who suffers chronic pain. They're out there, but for the most part any cheerfulness is a front or a sign of deep religious faith.

That said, I won't take Elavil anymore. I'm convinced by my chemical research that this drug damaged my retinas and caused my heart rhythm abnormality. We are complex bags of biochemistry. The law of unintended consequences definitely applies to medications. I think we should all medicate as if we are pregnant--take only what we absolutely cannot live without, because we are at risk of damaging ourselves in the long or short term from the interactions of everything we ingest.

I don't want to make the drug companies responsible for the damage the drugs caused me in combination for other drugs. I think we do need to be much better informed, as consumers, before we ingest. So the drug companies do have an obligation to make the information about their studies available to laypersons, AND they need to do more testing. To do more testing, the very stringent rules about how studies need to be done should be relaxed. RIght now the FDA makes it far too expensive to do studies on safety and effectiveness, especially on combinations of popular drugs.

If you're a man taking Viagra and Elavil, two very popular drugs, for instance, you should be able to find out what the combination might be doing to your body. Right now the studies on interactions just haven't been done because they are so expensive to do, not even for the permutations of the very biggest selling drugs.

The interactions of chemistry in our bodies are too complex to study in necessary detail, of course. That's as true for sucrose and trans-fatty acids as it is for oxycontin, of course--there's a risk to everything we do, and the risks multiply in combination! The trick is to minimize the risk and maximize the benefits. Most of us are not prepared to assess these factors ourselves, and rely on doctors and pharmacists who don't remember a bit of their college chemistry!

The elavil is prescribed to help me sleep at night and also is the most prescribed anti-depressant for chronic pain management. From what I've read about it and have been told, elavil has some pain alleviating characteristics also. Most doctor's who deal exclusively in pain management will put their chronic pain patients on an anti-depressant because by it's very nature, chronic pain leads to depression.

At differing times they've also had me on serzone, deseril (sp?) and a couple of other anti-depressants as well as the elavil.

Soma's great for me since so many of the muscle relaxers out there tend to leave me with a druggy hangover the next morning. So far, I haven't had any problem with the doctors prescribing soma. (I recently moved so had to change doctors)

They also will prescribe neurontin for chronic pain and it's normally prescribed for epilepsy but has been found to have some benefit for those in chronic pain.

Oops, I just realized I was writing a book. Sorry bout that!