Pain – Medications

Transcript

Particularly for these neuropathic pain conditions, we are finding that what most people think of as a pain medicine: aspirin, Ibuprofen, morphine, codeine, Vicodin. These do not work well. We need something that alters the way the nervous system functions. And so there’s a whole different group of medicines that we use to treat neuropathic pain. Very commonly it’s the antiseizure drugs or the anticonvulsants or the antidepressant medications. And then again it’s not because the patient is depressed or it’s not because they’re having seizures. It’s because of the properties these medicines have and their ability to alter nervous system function, which often we can use to reduce the abnormal firing and therefore the pain signals that the patient is getting.