The news this morning was led by the verdict in the Johnson & Johnson versus Oklahoma opiate case. The news has talked about all of the “opiate death.” It’s important to know many of these opiate deaths come from illegal drugs such as heroin. The name comes from the fact that all of these drugs both legal and illegal were derived from the same source as opium came from – a species of the poppy plant. Chemists have tinkered with the molecules necessary for pain relief and come up with a whole universe new drugs. They vary in strength. There is a scale in which morphine’s strength would be the base and all of these new drugs the chemists have come up with would be compared to morphine in their effectiveness. For instance, Tramadol one of the weakest and is just one 50th as effective as morphine. The problem with all of this tinkering is all of these new opiates are the only things we know that are effective in relieving pain. You might ask about the NSAIDs as pain relievers. Technically, they don’t directly attack pain. They attack the source of pain which is inflammation.
I didn’t know about this lack of pain relievers until I started my journey with my back. While modern medicine does wonderful things, it still cannot repair damage to the spine. I think I had some of the best surgeons in the world at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester Minnesota, but a series of operations have left me in worse shape after each one. The problem is any spinal operation risks damaging nerves and that seems to be what happened in my case. It has also left me with a constant source of pain. I’m sure all of you have been the doctor’s office and they ask you about your pain on a scale from 1 to 10 with one being almost no pain and 10 being unbearable. My pain level runs between a four and a five all of the time. That fact is only important in what it has taught me about opiates. They are a blessing in the short term, but really not usable on a day by day basis because your body adapts to them and they become less and less effective against pain. They also have some miserable side effects that continue even though they’re not blocking pain anymore; for example, constipation. And to fix that one problem you have to take other things and they cause other problems, so I finally came to the decision I would live with my pain level. The reason why is very simple. Because the whole family of opiates becomes less and less effective over time, you need higher and higher doses to get the same pain relief and that brings even more side effects. You come to realize that you’ll never be without pain.
I didn’t start this blog just to tell you about my problems, but to point out we need another pain relief medication. We don’t have one and from what the doctors have told me, they don’t see one coming. There are some other non-medication methods such as electrical devices that scramble the nerve impulses so pain signals never reached the brain. They don’t seem to be universally effective. In my case, they would require more surgery to implant the electrodes just to try the device. I have spent a total of 46 hours on the operating table with surgeons trying to do their best to help me. I’m not willing to experiment on my body again. It is as I said at the start of this paragraph – we need another pain relief medication.
