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.
I’ve read a lot of comments.
My personal experience is very different than what people are saying, maybe it applies to you, maybe it doesn’t.
I have the same thing over my life with different types of pain. I would be given different pain relievers from surgeons, dentists, doctors, etc. For the most part it did fuck all.
Now that I am decades older and I’ve gone through all this bullshit, I basically learned that I’m immune to most painkillers. I metabolize caffeine very quickly and codeine and morphine are in the same family - so they’re useless on me!
Freezing at the dentist always took double or triple. And very often the dentist would have to stop mid procedure and reapply freezing.
These are just a few, but certainly not all of my experiences, being completely baffled at the ineffectiveness of painkillers.
My friends could never understand why I was so blasé when I was prescribed heavy duty medications. And I could never understand why they were doing flying cartwheels to get them off me. It makes a lot more sense now that I figured shit out.
And like you, I turned to alcohol, actually at the advice of one of my oral surgeons who finally just said “look go home drink a 6 pack you won’t feel any pain”.
Let’s leave all the completely unethical recommendations out of the discussion for now, and accept the fact that we now have more knowledge about painkillers than we did back in the day.
All of this to say, you may be just simply immune to painkillers. There’s a variety of reasons for that, and it’s no sense trying to explore those in the comments with laypeople like myself.
But on to any advice that I might give you? Perhaps not advice per se… but to tell you that what I did which helped me and perhaps it will help you.
I finally got over all my chronic pain by stretching and strengthening. I’m not going to sugar-coat it, certain parts of it were hell. I went to an athletic therapist who made me cry, but made me stand up straight. And I devoted myself to doing all the exercises and stretches… yes… 45 minutes every 2nd day for like 10 weeks. But damn did it pay off. That initial investment (not trying to half-ass it or go through the motions) got me to a certain plateau where I barely have to stretch anymore, my body is pretty happy.
I sincerely hope any of this applies to you and can be used but if not oh well maybe it will help someone else!
I’m not convinced OTC pain meds do anything, especially Tylenol.
Tylenol is interesting - it’s a psychoactive drug. It reduces your brain’s ability to experience pain, or even understand the possibility of pain, rather than reducing the amount of pain you’re feeling. That means different people’s brain chemistry will result in very different results with Tylenol.
Studies were done that show people are slightly more likely to take risks when they’re on Tylenol. Wild stuff.
I think it very much depends on the type of and source of pain.
For me, Tylenol works for headaches and some cold/flu stuff but I’ve never really found it effective for strained muscles etc
Ditto what the others said. You might have just rolled bad RNG (DNA) at character creation (birth) and just gotten stuck with immunity to certain painkillers. It happens. Bad luck, friend.
I think it depends on the person too. Tylenol doesn’t work well for me, even prescription Tylenol; it kind of just makes me nauseous. Advil works great though.
My parents both seem to prefer Ibuprofen, but I swear by Excedrin as a miracle drug. But Excedrin is like, everything.
But Ibuprofen is better for muscle pain.
I have a type of rheumatoid arthritis (spondylitis) and nsaids have a pretty profound effect.
Oh, Excedrin and Tylenol absolutely help headaches. I’ve had some splitting headaches that weren’t migraines, and I can feel the pain get a lot better over 15-20. Of course water also helps, but it’s faster than natural, I think.
Basically the only thing that help my headaches is caffeine. But that’s probably a me problem.
They only work for me if I take a much larger dose than what the label suggests, but I fear for my liver.
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.
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.
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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.
To piggyback on another comment. Massage. I’m a massage therapist who sees clients with disk issues all the time.
99% of the time it’s because of shortened hip flexors (your psoas attached to your bottom vertebrae and as it shortens, is too tight to let your spine stretch which then just crushes your disks) due to both extended time in a seated position as well as a weak core. Stretch, get a massage, find a PT to help with chronic back pain. Start doing crunches before bed.
Also drink more water. Only kinda related but basically everyone should be drinking more water.
Piggyback?! Bro, people are in enough pain in this thread!
Oh, take my damn upvote you punny bastard. 😂
Why crunches before bed? Physical exercise before going to bed seems like insomnia recipe.
Is it not better to do it in the morning or the afternoon?
Statistically, you should be doing more exercises in general.
But working out absolutely does improve sleep, as well as mood, digestion, memory recall, anxiety, and basically every other common ailment.
Please go work out more. Even if its just a walk or some crunches. Just get 15-30 minutes per day of continuous exercise. I promise you you’ll see a difference
No one says the opposite. I’m a very active person.
Just not at night right before going to bed. I feel like that could lead to bad quality of sleep.
Well it’s your feelings compared to the huge amount of scientific backing. And the article I linked to has a bunch of sources too, although I consider John Hopkins Hospital a valid primary source for medicine
The article you linked states that many people have trouble sleeping if they do exercise before going to bed, because the physiological response of doing exercise activates the body in a way that makes it harder to sleep for a while and recommend doing it a couple of hours before.
Like the other response said, some light exercise before bed is generally good for sleep. If you feel it’s waking you up, your brain might already be in go-mode. Do you limit blue light or anything before bed?
If you still feel before bed is no good, or don’t have the time or whatever, literally anything is better than nothing.
Strengthening my core literally straightened my spine significantly and improved my lordosis. It’s like putting on a corset.
But also, if you can’t really do crunches, leg raises and planks are good too.
Hip hooks are also great for getting at those muscles, which are otherwise very difficult to stretch.
Idk what happened but over the weekend my back went to hell in a hand basket. I’m usually in pretty good shape but this went from 0-100 immediately. I’ve heard some good things about the GIBoard for core strength and stability so I’m looking to see if that helps. It’ll help me with stretching too so hopefully that’ll do something…
Ok, that giboard actually looks kind of awesome…does it easily someone like 140-250lbs?
The only minor detail for me might be that my balance is totally shit.
GIBoard
You got me looking at these. Then I started looking around. Is there a reason to get one of the ~200 USD balance boards over a 20 USD wobble board? Other than durability, I guess.
Different applications mostly, this is a slackboard and those are balance boards. There are knockoff slackboards but so far this thing kinda kicks ass. There’s a lot of different exercises that can be done on them but idk, it’s your call. I’m satisfied with my purchase though.
Been pretty much 10 years with back pain and I also have arthritis and neuropathy.
I tried NSAIDS, I tried the other ones, I forget name, tried the brain ones. They were worse than the pain. Destroyed my gut or made me want to blow my brains out and 0 relief.
I don’t really like opiates. Not too worried about the addiction as I am Larry Flint type and don’t really care if I am on or off it. They help better (to reduce pain not alleviate) than all the other crap I mentioned. I also take Baclofen once or twice a week to rest me muscles.
I take cannabis for my Aphantasia(a longer story not for here) which as an added bonus it also helps alleviate pain. I eat fruit bottom Balkan yogurt once every 2 days and have no plumbing issues since I started the yogurt.
Degenerative disc disease ftw?
Generally, it depends on what’s causing the pain as regards what reduces it.
Booze is a CNS depressant. It puts a damper on everything in the central nervous system, and that includes pain perception.
Heat typically works by improving blood flow to affected areas.
So, most likely, what’s happening is that your muscle spasms are caused by the pain, rather than being the immediate source of pain. The tension does make pain levels increase, but stopping that without addressing the originating cause can’t and won’t eliminate all of it.
So, muscle relaxers can only do so much. I would argue that they’re doing something, because there’s not been any cases of total immunity to any that I’ve been aware of, and they’re a first attempt for most chronic pain cases. But if they don’t target the actual cause, then they can’t do enough. In other words, if the pain is causing your muscles to tighten up, a muscle relaxer is only going to partially reduce that tension because only part of that tension is involuntary.
It may not be conscious tension, but it isn’t something that is caused by the muscle itself. It’s a response to pain. So a muscle relaxer is kinda like a bandaid, not stitches.
Booze, however, is going to work in your brain, blocking off the pain signals, or more accurately reducing your ability to perceive them. Once you no longer perceive the pain, that part of you that’s holding those muscles tight to try and prevent/reduce the oh-so-lovely pain from bulging, slipped, or herniated discs start to relax almost all the way, as opposed to the tiny bit that the muscle relaxers can make them unclench.
Now, it’s important to note that the use of involuntary here doesn’t mean that the rest of your muscle tension is a choice. It just means that the part of your nervous system that is making it happen is a different section than the involuntary part. Now, you can actually exert conscious control over that kind of muscle tension, but it takes effort and practice. And, it probably won’t reach 100% release because your brain and body are going to resist it. Plus, pretty much the second you stop doing the methods that relax the muscles, they’ll go right back to trying to keep your back immobile. So it’s never a permanent solution.
The key to finding a balance often means the long, hard road of physical therapy combined with training in progressive relaxation, breath control, and all the other tools that give you the ability to intercede in the process.
Alcohol isn’t a long term solution. To the contrary, the longer you rely on it, the worse you’re gong to perceive the pain, and the more it’ll take to get relief.
There is, however, some good-ish news. DDD is progressive. But! Most of the time it’ll reach a point of relative stasis. Things will bulge and slip more radically during the early part of the disease process. At some point, it’ll slow down its progression, and the changes tend you be more localized than along the entire spine. So you’ll reach a point where it won’t get worse fast, and will usually only get worse in small sections. I’m in that phase of things myself, and it isn’t exactly fun, but it means my pain and mobility levels are stable. There’s a high chance you’ll reach that point too.
Once you hit that point, as long as you haven’t pushed things into addiction, stuff like muscle relaxers, Tylenol and the like can keep pain levels under control enough to get by.
Until then, keep on your PT program. You want to keep as much flexibility, mobility, and joint health as possible. It really is one of those things that if you don’t use it you will lose it. But don’t make the mistake of doing absurd shit when you aren’t in debilitating pain. You can’t actually move normally, you just can’t perceive all the minor injuries you’re causing that make the pain worse once whatever you use wears off. That’s one of the reasons I quit accepting opiates. Yeah, I hurt less, but I couldn’t tell when I was doing something wrong, so I was getting worse, faster. I’m just now recovering properly from fucking my back up the last time I took some of my opiate pain meds. And that was in November ffs.
So, if you need the relief to get by, use what you gotta. Just don’t fall into the trap of thinking that lack of pain means there’s nothing wrong.
As someone who was just diagnosed with C5-C6 spondylosis and facet arthritis, with an MRI ordered to see how absolutely fucked my trapezius is; thank you for reinforcing what I’ve already told every doctor since my ex-fiance’s little brother overdosed and died:
Fuck opiates.
Everything else you mentioned was informative or reinforced my doctors advice, I appreciate it.
This was fascinating, thank you for taking the time.
If alcohol works it might be neuropathic pain and then this could work on it as well, using some of the same mechanisms of action as alcohol
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabapentin
But I dislike giving medical advice as am not a doctor. Something to research at least.
Maybe it has to do with its effects on GABA receptors? Have you ever tried something like gabapentin or pregabalin?
The doc put me on gabapentin for my nerve pain (ulnar and carpel tunnel) and I thought it was hitting the right receptors to help me stay off of alcohol, or dulled my desire for it. Turns out I was just self medicating the nerve pain and with the GABA I didn’t need the booze so much.
I’ve got a degerative disease called Anklyosing Spondylitis, bit of a tongue twister but also my pelvis is splintering due to arthritus associated with the condition so very painful. I find dicofenac works pretty well for flare ups but sometimes I’ll switch over to booze if I’m going out since that works better. NB: I don’t mix booze with the NSAID if I can avoid it, might just intersect at the tail end.
Opiates work better for the pain too but that’s a whole other can of worms I try to avoid opening.
Might be neuropathic.
If so, they give gabapentin out like candy, it is addictive tho so you may want to consider it “as needed” even tho they’ll want you to take it on a schedule.
Gabapentin isn’t addictive as far as I’m aware, but pregabalin aka lyrica is. Both do similar things
If gabapentin is addictive it must be psychological because I’ve been on and off of it for years now and there isn’t any withdrawal I can discern.
Everybody is different.
I can’t metabolize most painkillers, they do literally nothing to me because I’m missing a liver enzyme. I could eat a handful of percacet every day for months and quit cold turkey easy, because I was never really getting anything out of to begin with.
There are countless reasons why people react differently to medication, that’s why doctors just try random shit till something seems to work.
It might be educated guesswork, but it’s still guesswork. And there’s very little effort put into why/how one thing worked over others, if it works that’s the end of it.
Is withdrawal a requirement for a substance to be defined as addictive?
Addiction and dependence are two different things. You can be dependent without addiction or addicted without dependence. For one cannabis can make people addicted, but the myth from that is because it doesn’t really cause any sort of physical dependence.
On the other hand lyrica etc benzos for example and especially opiates will cause physical dependence, and even if you don’t like want to take the pills, as in you don’t crave them, you’re not addicted to them, you may be dependent and then get withdrawal from quitting.
Addiction can also cause withdrawal, but psychological withdrawal is a bit different than physical.
well, addiction is dependence with harm. Every time I’ve been prescribed a narcotic I’ve felt withdrawal pains and gabapentin does not do that to me.
Addiction and dependence are two different things. You can be dependent without addiction or addicted without dependence. For one cannabis can make people addicted, but the myth from that is because it doesn’t really cause any sort of physical dependence.
On the other hand lyrica etc benzos for example and especially opiates will cause physical dependence, and even if you don’t like want to take the pills, as in you don’t crave them, you’re not addicted to them, you may be dependent and then get withdrawal from quitting.
Addiction can also cause withdrawal, but psychological withdrawal is a bit different than physical.
Whatever. Disagree with the dictionary:
I laugh at your puny knowledge of the subject
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction
Addiction is a neuropsychological disorder characterized by a persistent and intense urge to use a drug or engage in a behavior that produces natural reward, despite substantial harm and other negative consequences.
neuropsychological disorder
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance_dependence
Substance dependence, also known as drug dependence, is a biopsychological situation whereby an individual’s functionality is dependent on the necessitated re-consumption of a psychoactive substance because of an adaptive state that has developed within the individual from psychoactive substance consumption that results in the experience of withdrawal and that necessitates the re-consumption of the drug.[1][2] A drug addiction, a distinct concept from substance dependence, is defined as compulsive, out-of-control drug use, despite negative consequences.[1][2] An addictive drug is a drug which is both rewarding and reinforcing.[
biopsychological situation
#A drug addiction, a distinct concept from substance dependence
despite substantial harm
laugh at what now?
I have neuropathic pain and acupuncture has helped manage it so I can stay away from these kinds of medicine. Might be worth giving a shot (if nothing else you get a nap, which I always welcome).
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alcohol is a muscle relaxer. Go to chiro or massage.
Go to chiro
If OP does do that, please, please, please get informed on what the history is around chiropractic adjustment, and then determine which practitioner (not doctor since they aren’t medically licensed) fits your needs and acceptable methodology.
Chiropractic practice originated around spiritualism, and to some it’s a con man’s version of osteopathic treatment.
Chiropractic adjustment reportedly works for some people, but there are many practitioners out there that may do more harm than good.
While I do agree to an extent. This isn’t true across the board. My chiro is also a license doctor for example. Definitely do some homework. But Chiro, generally, works great for back\spine issues. I would be a complete mess with out my chiropractor.
But Chiro, generally, works great for back\spine issues
citation needed, because as far as I know, no efficacy from ‘chrio’ has ever been demonstrated, this is not surprising since its not science based.
Well, I know people like to say this, but I’ve been going to Chiro for over 12 years and I would say the “not based in science” thing feels false largely. I’ve had slipped discs, nerve compression, and a misaligned vertebra that I get treated for. The adjustments bring me great results time and time again.
Even the Mayo clinic agrees that chiro has benefits. https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/chiropractic-adjustment/about/pac-20393513
Don’t just believe whatever you hear about health stuff. Too much misinformation out there.
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At times, it’s like doing physical therapy. It helps but doesn’t cure things, usually you are doing it in conjunction with Physical Therapy. I only go when I need to personally. Sometimes I don’t go for over a year or two, then I’ll have short stint of treatment, then back to time off.
But they’re a doctor. They get the title Dr from being a doctor and not a chiro. Chiros are allowed to call themselves doctors in many places for some damn reason.
No, he is an MD\Physician and a Chiro (in my case)
What you’re really asking is “why do some drugs work for me, while others don’t?”
I’d bet there are some prescriptions that would work for you and probably a number of other “recreational” drugs too
Alcohol is a solution
In your face, nondrinkers! 😂
