I was seen by a physician’s assistant at the local immediate med center and she prescribed Neurontin for the fire like pain I’m having with a ferocious pinched nerve pain in my arm. This crap is worse than useless and does exactly zero for the pain over the last three days of taking it. I might as well be taking sugar pills.
In looking it up it’s an anti-convulsant and kinda-sorta-maybe if I’m lucky provide nerve pain relief. Why the hell was she so up on this crap shoot of a drug instead of giving me something that works like Percoset or something similar?
Neurontin can be quite useful in reducing neuropathic pain.
It’s a bit more effective for other types of neuropathies, such as diabetic or uremic ones. But it can help one deal with chronic radicular pain too. I’ve prescribed it for that purpose, but usually with other adjuncts like anti-inflammatory pain relievers and physical therapy.
I’ve never found it real helpful for treating acute radicular flare-ups, though. Frankly, short-term opiates are more useful there.
I’ve taken it for radicular pain and had good success. But it took much longer than 3 days to ramp up to the full dose, let alone to get the relief. I understand it reduces the tendency of a nerve to give a signal of pain (which the brain understands as beiing in the extremity) because of trauma along the length of the nerve (which the brain has no understanding of).
Interesting thread. Mr. K just went to a doctor for a sometimes-pain-but-mostly-weakness-and-tingling-fingers thing. They prescribed an EMG (which sounds pretty yukky). Is this they type of drug they’d prescribe for this kind of problem?
I had that and it didn’t work for my pain. I didn’t stay on it past two days due to a severe reaction to it. It’s one of those medicines that was not approved for pain at the time either and I bet it still isn’t.
Irrelevant. Many good studies have shown it to be safe and effective for neuropathic pain, so to not use it for that purpose just because it was developed as a seizure drug would be foolish.
I was on this for the pain from shingles over the summer. It worked well, but took about a week to kick in I think. At the very least you should follow the prescription if you’re not suffering any side effects.
Oh, it’s been studied for that purpose. Rather extensively.
It just wasn’t initially approved for that purpose.
And dragging it back to the FDA to approve it for neuropathy treatment would be time-consuming, expensive, and all it would do is allow the company to advertise that it is effective for neuropathy, a fact that most docs who treat neuropathy know full well. So they don’t do that.
(As an aside, the drug company did get into a lot of trouble for advertising it to certain docs for the purpose of treating neuropathy. So they got a hefty fine.)
<slight hijack> Q the M – just curious, but my MIL gave me some of her neurontin once because I was having tension headaches – I took it, and it was a party drug for me. Did nothing for the pain, but got me all kinds of high – is that normal at all or just me? FWIW, I do have a very odd system, prozac is a party drug for me, valium gets me wired and cocaine puts me to sleep. </slight hijack>
Funny thing is, I don’t much like popping pills for my recreational purposes. On the rare occasion these days that I want to get high, I prefer to just drink a fifth of Jack. I got all my partying out as a kid. I just wondered if this was another one of those odd reactions that I have and no one else does.