Module 9 - Medication

Ngā rongoā

You will have tried a range of medications to help reduce your pain. This module explores medications used for pain, their side effects, and limitations. We'll also be talking about the natural drug cabinet within our brains.

Understandably there is an expectation that there should be a medication able to lessen your pain, considering advances in medicine and technology.   But yet, for most people in chronic pain there doesn’t seem to be a ‘magic pill’.  Watch More about medication to find out more.  

In this module:

• Find out more about different types of pain medication
• Learn how the chemicals in medicine link with different parts and actions of the brain
• Open the natural drug cabinet inside your brain

Tip: Release your brain's natural chemicals        

Release a few doses of natural medicines/chemicals in your brain every day; music and singing releases some good ones for example! Review your pain medications with your doctor if you feel that you get more problems or side effects than benefits. Remember to exercise most days.

[image: cat, sunny landscape, person about to swallow a pill with pictures of an active person, a happy person, a sun, a musical note, and two people on it]

This ‘Live Well With Pain’ booklet is a great resource. It has been created to help you understand the different types of medications used for chronic pain including their limitations and side effects. Living with persistent pain: where do medicines fit in?  

Opioid medications have been mentioned in both resources as problematic.  Here is a summary of the risks of long-term-use of Opioids

If you are prescribed and taking opioid medications daily, you can find a brief questionnaire called "Medicines Decision Guide" for you to help decide what you might speak to your doctor about at Downloads - Live Well with Pain 

Our service is linked with a research team that have developed a website to support anyone that is considering to taper opioids.  If you are interested to view this, please let me know. You will be asked to provide your consent and some feedback on the website after having access to it for some weeks. 

Here is a document outlining the way medicines mimic chemicals that are naturally produced in your brain and body Boosting your natural drug cabinet 

To explore some of these naturally produced chemicals, here is a podcast interview with the author of ‘The DOSE effect’ a book, outlining the role of these chemicals particularly related to anxiety – but very relevant also to chronic pain.   

1111: Neuroscience Meets Anxiety: A Conversation with TJ Power on The Dose Effect

[image: Meet your D.O.S.E. Chemicals, Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin, Endorphins. The C-Athlete]                                 

Hear patients tell us how looking at their natural drug cabinet in the brain helped them: Listen to the medication stories