Even when talking about opioids a lot of chronic pain patients do not take their prescribed medication unless things are absolutely horrible, exactly because of this rhetoric! People deserve to have relief without always being side-eyed about addiction. AND people with addictions shouldn’t be your fucking boogey man prop to scare people out of taking medication when they need it.
Anyway, back to pain. Especially chronic pain.
It is harder to calm a body down than to keep it from getting to the breaking point in the first place. If you let your pain get to a fever pitch before taking you medication, you’ve already done damage and the opioid may not be able to bring you back from that.
So some people think they need to take more to make it work, except they shouldn’t take more, they should have had it time managed so that their pain doesn’t explode to the point where an opioid would do little to help.
Toughing it out can also compound complex issues.
For example: You are in pain. You feel you should be “used to it” by now, or some other nonsense. So. You don’t take your pain meds, so you feel more tense, so your muscles spasm more, so it’s not safe for you to do normal activities (cooking, driving, etc), so you do something safe and more passive, like reading or goingo n the internet, so you develop a tension headache or even trigger a migraine, so you stress out your joints, your body gets put on alert mode, you feel mentally stressed, your focus is harder to draw away from the pain, the pain and one’s perception of it, increases. You now have to spend a full few days in bed because you tried to tough out your body when it needed help.
Addiction can ruin lives. But so can chronic pain.
Folks need to stop scare mongering about medication in general. Take your meds, use them when needed, if you think there may be a problem, talk to your doctor and help manage things. Don’t be scared to take your medication.
