re: Legit chronic pain people

I take Lyrica and Cymbalta because of pain in my left leg. I have nerve and vascular damage after a blood clot caused compartment syndrome in that leg. Don't know if the damage is all from the pressure. Some might be from the fasciotomy surgeries.

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Laser Spine Institute in Tampa Florida

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Have two clients so not a study, however one was pain free for about 6 months. The other never was relieved of pain.

It's not a sure fire thing for everyone that has any kind of spinal procedures. I was in chronic pain for 6 years and looking at a possible lumbar spine fusion prior to reaching out to Laser Spine Institute. The nerve pain I had for 6 years, GONE, lower chronic back pain, Gone, the constant leg pain, GONE!! It may not work for everyone but I will say it was 100% success and I'm going on 7 weeks of the healing process and feel better with each passing day.

Not sure about the procedure you need, but Dr. Oberlander at Neuromedical Center in Baton Rouge was surgeon for my neck. Not a single problem since the procedure 8 years ago. Hope you find relief soon.

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Who cares if junkies overdose on prescription pain meds? Whoopie doo! Why make it nearly impossible to obtain for people that need them?

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this...those with legit chronic pain don't "get high" even with strong pain meds.they are used to dull the pain and make it bearable.

Agree wholeheartedly Fratigerguy & porkrind.

I've got nerve damage and degenerative disc disease and osteoarthritis. Its a bowl of frickin cherries.
But according to the morons and fake doctors on this site I'm a junkie lookin' to get high. I'd like one of these brave self-righteous souls to tell me to my face "pain wont kill you". Maybe not, but it does drain the life from you. It is nonstop debilitating pain. It is exhausting. It is real.
Was on painkillers for six damn long years. Weaned myself off.
My go to now:

Weed, Lyrica, Gabopentin & Robaxin.
And could we please change that stupid "pain chart" from 1-10 to 1-100. My pain level on a good day is about a 7, bad days about 14. I tell my doc "when the pain scale goes up to 40 let me know"
Its outdated and stupid.

Actually I have.
Speaking from experience.
I was weened off the painkillers over time. That's the point.

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3G/day tylenol. That's interesting. How does this affect a person who is in pain to the level that they don't eat and drink.

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Well, that's obviously an underdosing and would promptly be stepped up to other means quickly, even including opiates.
Here is where I get what I alluded to earlier.

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The odds of recovery from chronic pain were almost 4 times higher among individuals not using opioids compared with individuals using opioids. In addition, use of strong opioids was associated with poor health-related quality of life. Furthermore, the results indicated that individuals with chronic pain using strong opioids pain had a higher risk of death than individuals without chronic pain (HR: 1.67; 95% CI: 1.03-2.70).

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I did say that opiates are reserved for cancer and sparingly used in short term pain...That should have said "typically." As noted before, I prescribe opiates pretty often, but they don't offer and long-term benefit and do offer a lot of long-term harm because chronic pain is a very complex disease process. Essentially every patient with it also has accompanying depression and typically at least a handful of social/external factors influencing it. The point I was attempting to make was that these also need to be addressed and opiate scripts do still need to be a last resort in chronic pain and kept even to a minimum in the acute pain setting.

Not one word alluded to "junkies" or anything of the like. But I'll go ahead and add a bit about me:
I suffer from chronic low back pain which is multifactorial. I have hereditary fairly severe degenerative disk disease and had a big injury when I was 16. I haven't been able to do squats since that day, I had to quit most sports. I went from being a very active, very in-shape college football hopeful to a guy who sometimes has to pause for 5 minutes to get out of a car because sometimes I see white and sweat when I swing my hip out the wrong way. I also had a short run of prescription drug use to deal with it. I wasn't any better off. It still hurt every day. I couldn't do anything I wasn't able to do before it except not focus on it here and there. Therapy also didn't offer any benefit. I'm not a great surgical candidate- studies show people like me split into surgical and non surgical groups are no different at 12 months. It's led to pretty severe depression to the point that I didn't really want to be here anymore.


Many of you asked a generic question and took my generic response to be answers to specific scenarios, which it was far from. I do not think anyone who gets by on opiates is a "bad" person or "junkie" or any such thing. Heck, to think so is to think of myself at one point of my life. The only point I meant to make was there is a lot more to treating people than matching the words "pain" "opiates" and "good." This seems to have been a thread in response to another thread. Maybe I missed the real meaning of "legit" when jumped in, but the problem I have with the word "legit" is that everyone who has chronic pain has "legit" chronic pain, but very few of them will see benefit from opiate therapy, and it saddens me to see them not use other alternatives because some colleagues of mine see them as a cash cow to bring in, write a script for, and kick them out the door to come back in a month for more.

The Laser spine institute doesn't do anything different than most of the local surgeons. They don't actually use lasers, they just spend a ton of money on marketing. Frankly I wouldn't want to go to a place for surgery where I wasn't evaluated first with a physical exam. Also if you fly in and out for the surgery and then have a complication, who takes care of you after?

It's like someone getting in a wreck on the interstate by the Miss. River bridge and I am in traffic and have to wait 4 hours for the tow truck and the road to be cleared all because of WHAT SOMEONE ELSE DID. All of the opiate abusers who are making our elected officials change the laws for everyone, therefore making the ones who did nothing wrong, suffer. Collateral damage is what they call it in war.