Pain Medications
Pain medications are often used by your doctors to help reduce chronic pain. Medications work best when combined with other types of treatment such as nerve blocks and physical therapy to increase your level of physical activity.
Ongoing review of your pain medications is important to maximise pain relief and minimise side effects. Your pain specialist will assess your medications and work with you to get the doses and combinations correct. We also work with you and guide you in managing your own pain medications so you can adjust them depending on your needs.
It is preferable to take two or more pain medications in low doses, rather than just one pain medication in a big dose. This is because various pain medications work differently in the body but all can cause serious side effects. Taking a few medications at lower doses reduces side effects and allows them to work on different parts of the pain in combination to significantly reduce pain.
Medications commonly used for the treatment of pain
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Simple Analgesics
Simple analgesics are designed to relieve pain, but less potent than other analgesic medications.
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Anti-neuropathic
These medications work on nerve pain.
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Anti-depressant
Antidepressants are a type of medicine used to treat clinical depression.
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Muscle relaxants
Muscle relaxers are used to relieve discomfort. They are generally prescribed for short-term use to treat acute, painful musculoskeletal conditions.
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Analgesic medication
Analgesics are medications that relieve pain.
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Topical Medication
Sometimes pain medications are creams or ointments that can be applied to areas of the body that cause chronic pain. This is an example of off-label use of pain medications. They work very well for some people and have very few, if any side effects.
We work with compound pharmacies that are able to make combinations of pain medications that can be tailored to your pain condition.
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Infusions
Sometimes we give pain medications by infusion over a few days as an in-hospital treatment. These medications include ketamine and lignocaine infusion. We only use these treatments in carefully selected patients with chronic pain for whom oral pain medications have failed.