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Originally Posted by twitch7569
FYI- In a substance abuse class I took, I learned that after an extended period of opiate use....the body builds up a tolerance and needs more and more of the drug to get the same effect....hence addiction/dependence. But another thing that was interesting is that after using opiates, you can develop a hyper-sensitivity to pain....meaning, your pain receptors feel pain at a level that without the opiates, you would not feel pain. The pain is real....not all in your head....but it's worse because you have become tolerant to the opiates. Then comes the cycle of feeling more pain and needing more pills to ease the pain and then the addiction and then depression and so on and so on. What you can try it to stop the pain meds for a few weeks....you will feel rotten and may even feel like you have a case of slight flu and you will feel your pain but....it will pass if you can get thru the phase. Then you will know if your pain is due to hypersensivity or injury. Google non-medication pain methods to help get you thru it but it won't be easy. Just an idea.
Hope it helps some.
Missy
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Hi everyone this is my first entry and first reply. I am sober 27 years, I am a professional therapist in addiction, and run the NFL's drug program for the 9 teams in the Northeast. I am joining this group because I wanted to finally use this technology to remind me that I do not have all the answers and as I remind myself before every therapy session; "the one on the other side of the desk is the patient." I am a fellow traveler. I wanted to reply to Missy and the head games that occur with prescription opiates. This was my drug of choice and I realized that I wound up believing that being "normal" was having no pain." Obviously this was before sobriety, but it made my entrance into recovery very difficult. I really believed that I had pain, but I was taking pills for any slight discomfort and desensitizing myself to the daily normal dings and dents and I had lost judgment of real pain completely. Pain is BS, we take pain pills in increasing and addictive amounts because we like the feeling. The high. One thing that these pills gave me was energy, a relaxed but vibrant energy to get things done. So on top of creating no appropriate tolerance for pains and normal "ouches" I now had come to believe that the only or best way to get anything done was to have these opiate pills in my system. When my moment of clarity came, I was stunned to see how many pills I was taking daily. Of course I conveniently forgot I had 5 doctors and 6 pharmacies. Also, my pills were Percocet and they have acetaminophen- a lot, and my liver enzymes were sky rocketing. Hope this helps, keep taking charge, andy