Understanding Addiction to Pain Meds

The family of painkillers known as the opioids and morphine derivatives is highly addictive. Pain killers such as codeine are not meant to be taken for a long time. Even relatively harmless medicines such as tylenol with codeine can be dependency creating if someone takes them on a regular basis.

What To Do About Addiction

Addiction to pain meds is something that a lot of people joke about, especially people who suffer from occasional mild migraines or other acute illnesses. However, this addiction is a real thing. Anyone who suffers from recurring pain and who takes painkillers for more than a couple of days a week, or for more than a week at a time, should talk to their doctor to find out if there is a non-addictive medicine that they could be taking instead of codeine or morphine.

Morphine is a strong painkiller, but the way that it acts on the nervous system means that it should be used only for severe, short term pain, such as after an operation. If someone uses morphine regularly, their body becomes tolerant to it and greater doses are needed to achieve the pain killing effect. When they stop taking the pain killer, they may experience some unpleasant side effects including cravings and phantom pains.

How To Get Help

Painkiller addiction is incredibly common, even among people that you would not expect to be susceptible to displaying patterns of substance abuse, such as athletes. The good news is that there is support available for people who need help to beat such an addiction, and because doctors are more aware of how addictive some medications can be these days, they are more careful about what they prescribe, and they are willing to help people with chronic pain find safe ways to control their symptoms without having to rely on drugs.

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The Dangers of Addiction to Pain Meds

 

Prescription pain medications are most often narcotics like Oxycodone HCL and Hydrocodone which come in a variety of medications such as Vicodin, Lortab and even generic versions. Many addictions start out innocently enough as an injury that a doctor prescribes a narcotic pain killer for.

But the longer a patient is treated with these pain medications, the greater the chance that a tolerance and dependance can develop. Before long, the user may need a daily dose of these medications just to feel "normal", even if they no longer derive a "high" from them.

As the tolerance and the dependency grows, their body will require greater doses that even a legal prescription cannot meet. So the user has to turn to alternate methods of obtaining those drugs, and that leads to illegal means and the costs are incredibly expensive.

Users often find that breaking free of these drugs is not so easily done. Quitting cold turkey is simply hard to do, especially when the body is used to having them. Withdrawal symptoms can be severe and quite miserable. The user will experience nausea, sweating, flu-like symptoms, and many other unpleasant symptoms which may linger for days after the last dose.

So the user will resort to desperate measures such as stealing others medications, buying them on the street, seeing several doctors or even forging a prescription. All of these are illegal and can come with serious consequences when they catch up with the user.

Another danger of narcotic meds that many addicts do not consider is that most of these narcotics are blended with acetaminophen which can be very damaging to your liver in high doses.

So do not be deceived into thinking that pain killer addiction isn't serious just because the drugs are legally prescribed medications. Trying to rationalize your use of narcotics that way is the first sign that you may indeed have a problem and should deal with it right away.