Living with a Painkiller Addiction



Posted: Saturday, April 25, 2009

by Patrick Meninga
Spiritual River

Addiction to painkillers can be a real problem for any person who has had a serious injury or illness in their life. The medical community is not always very aware of the addictive potential of narcotic painkillers, so they have a tendency to prescribe them when they could seek alternate solutions. This can eventually result in drug addiction for unsuspecting patients.

The problem with using opiates to treat pain is that they do not really treat the pain at all. In fact, what they do is to simply dull the brain. There are pain signals that travel through the body to the brain, telling the brain "Hey! I'm hurting! There is a problem here!" The opiate painkillers do not actually do anything to treat the source of the problem, and they do not actually do anything to divert the pain signals either. What opiates do is that they simply dope the brain so that it does not care as much about the pain signals. The effect is a bit like making your brain drunk without getting your entire body drunk. This is the "rag in the alarm clock" approach to pain management.

So narcotic pain pills (these are the kind that can cause addiction) do not actually reduce our pain, all they really do is dull our senses in the brain so that the mind does not worry about the pain signals as much. Other medications, such as nsaids like Ibuprofen, reduce inflammation and can actually reduce the level of pain in your body right at the source.

So if you become addicted to painkillers, then you will have to figure out a number of things in order to recover. The first thing you will have to do is to get your body physically detoxed from the medication. Coming off addictive painkillers can be really nasty, so it is advisable that you go to a treatment center that has a detoxification area so that you can be medically supervised during withdrawal. Most drug rehabs will give you something to help with the withdrawal from the narcotics so that you are not so miserable.

The second thing you will have to do in order to overcome painkiller addiction is to find a new way to manage your chronic pain. As mentioned above, there are alternative medications that are not addictive that can actually work better than opiates in some cases, because they do more right at the source of the pain. In addition to this, you might try a pain clinic, where they can treat your pain locally on a daily basis. There are also things such as TENS units and holistic remedies as well that might be able to help you manage your pain without opiates.

The final piece of the puzzle when overcoming a drug addiction is to create a new life for yourself without chemicals. Yes, that is a tall order and the challenge of doing so is just as big as it sounds. If you have been addicted to painkillers for a long time then you are going to have to focus on your recovery and learning a new way to live for a long time as well. We did not become addicted overnight so it takes time to build up a successful recovery.

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Would you like to learn more about painkiller addiction? Visit
http://www.spiritualriver.com/
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