Teens in Chronic Pain

While recovering from my tenth surgery this past week, I finished reading a great book entitled Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs. As someone who relies on pain medication on a daily basis and a college student planning on going into public relations, I thought that this would be an interesting read. While I thought it started off a bit slow, the book quickly picked up and the research that this author, who used to cover the pharmaceutical industry for the New York Times, was astounding. The biggest thing I took away from this book was to make sure I independently researched the medications I had been prescribed.

According to the book, a lot of medications are only 40-50% effective. The new drugs tend to be old, much cheaper drugs with a slight alteration that with tons of marketing can become a billion+ dollar drug for the company. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I take Vicodin (lowest dosage) every day to deal with my chronic knee pain. Before I had surgery last week, my pain intensity has significantly increased due to an injury and my Vicodin was no longer helping enough. I saw my pain specialist, who I see about once a month, and he upped my Vicodin dosage, gave me a prescription for this anti-inflammatory cream, and a prescription for Cymbalta. He told me that Cymbalta was an anti-depressant drug that had been proven to help with pain including fibromyalga. He gave me free samples of Cymbalta and the cream.

I had just started reading this book and the author frequently used anti-depressant medications as examples of medications that are really pushed onto people. I’m not saying that it’s not important and effective or even discounting its helpfulness to other people. However, I decided to look up Cymbalta on Google before I started taking it. Boy, was I glad I did. The drug turned out to be an anti-depressant for people with major bouts of depression (I was definitely down about all the pain, but not depressed) and also helped with pain on the side. I then looked at the side effects on websites that allowed patients using that drug to leave their feedback. On one site, Cymbalta had 1400+ reviews and a majority of them were negative in nature. Another site had close to 1000 negative responses. To put this in perspective, the Vicodin page had 26 and the few negative ones were about constipation. These patients complained that (1) Cymbalta wasn’t incredibly effective, (2) either made them insomniacs or made them drowsy all the time, (3) made some taking it only for pain and not depression contemplate suicide, and (4) had intense withdrawal symptoms even after being on the drug for only a week. I didn’t want to risk messing with my mind when I’m just going through a rough spot with my pain so I opted not to take it.

Now I’m not completely blaming my doctor for prescribing me the medication. I know for a fact that pharmaceutical sales representatives come by his office and he certainly has his fair share of medication pens, paper, brochures, etc. I believe that a representative told him that the drug could help with pain and highlighted the key positive points. He’s incredibly busy. Packed with patients, depositions all the time, fighting insurance companies, etc. I think sales representatives take advantage of that fact. So I think it’s smart for us, as chronic pain patients, to double check our doctor’s prescription in case something like this comes up. We should be informed as to what exactly we’re putting in our body and if it’s worth the risk.

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