Sorry to hear you're dealing with increased pain. Balancing work, pain, and travel is a struggle I definitely relate to. Can also relate to wishing there were more (tested & effective) holistic treatment options available for pain management.

Our board here has been pretty slow lately. You may get more replies if you say a little bit about yourself and your journey (not a requirement by any means, just a thought).

Do we really get to blame Dr.'s for not "giving us enough warning on the dangers of pain med dependence?" Medications come with a booklet of information from the pharmacy. In this day and age of the Internet anything you want to know about a medication is just a google search away. There's really no excuse for anyone to not know that Narcotic Pain Meds (I'm guessing these are what your referring to) are dependence creative. There's really not a need to refer to non-cancer chronic pain anymore, the majority of chronic pain patients now are not cancer patients. There are holistic treatments but Medical Dr.'s do not use Holistic treatments, if you want to find out about Holistic Treatments you would need to go to a Holistic Practioner and once again that would be your choice over going to a Medical Dr. and you could find that information on the Internet. There won't be Holistic Practioner's in every City or State of course, so it may be a limited treatment availability, but that is not a medical Dr.'s responsibility.

Your still taking your pain meds, but you don't have to, you can detox from them and not deal with the dependence issues and try things like massage, acupuncture, herbals and such holistic treatments. I guess MJ would be considered holistic of sorts.

The thing is, everyone has a choice to use what methods they want for pain control, your Dr. is not forcing you to take narcotic meds. But the truth is holistic medicine is not going to work as well as pharmaceutical medicine, i.e. narcotics. So, you choose what level of pain you can deal with...

From your post is doesn't sound like you can do well without your meds......

Honestly I suffered chronic pain for 12 years and had 6 surgeries as well as chronic migraines my whole child and adult life. The only thing that I find that prevents dibilitating migraines is my narcotic pain meds. If I feel like I don't need them anymore for my pain issues that I needed then for I ween off and stop then the migraines start again. It wasn't withdrawls I made that mistake the first time I up and stopped meds without telling my doctor. Ppl kill me when they think everyone is a junkie if they take narcotics. It's a choice to be an addict to me. When you suffer from serious chronic pain and you seriously need them to get out of bed to make your child breakfast and send them off to school and then get yourself ready for your day sadly it's needed. Some days I don't need them. If ppl abuse them and take too much for too long , they get violently ill feeling , nausea , diarrhea and flu like symptoms. I wouldn't wish that on anyone. Narcotic pain relievers without Tylenol or ibuprofen in them are actually safer for your liver and kidneys taken properly then any OTC or NSAID and that's pathetic. I gave up my pain management doctor because he refused to lower my dosage from 20mg oxycodone to 10mg oxycodone. - he is a suboxone doctor and gets kick backs for selling suboxone. So he is a pill mill. Get them hooked line and sinker. It's sick. I'm off my pain meds and I can barely walk right now. I try and just get in water and move in the water at least but every joint hurts me and my disc herniations, well at 35 years old it shouldn't take me 2 hours and crying to get out of bed. I'm a mess and I hate it. To top it off I was hit last Tuesday and have a concussion from another accident. Every car I'm in has a bulls eye on it.

Oh and I'm sorry I'm no help I just found this bored. I deleted my Facebook . I'm dealing with chronic migraines, chronic back and neck injuries as well as chronic hip/joint pain. Fatigue. Weight gain 45 pounds in a year! I'm a hot mess as soon as I turned 34-35 my weight and my body started hurting more so I'm working on the weight first. It will most likely reduce the pain I have in hips and legs. I had carpal tunnel surgery in both hands and 4 surgeries on my cervix.

Ohhh one more thing. I'm on imatrex 100 mg for migraines
Topamax 25mg
Ibuprofen 600 doesn't help at all
Sometime perk 5 mg really don't help at all
And phentermine 30mg for weight loss
Magnesium 400mg to help with migraine prevention
Ice and heat for neck and back pain

Dear Headneckinjured
I have battled with pain most of my life and have resorted to narcotics this past few years. The trick is to not to use the full dosage to eliminate all the pain but use enough to take the pain down to a tolerable level and that won't be the same dosage every day. I am always left with alot of extra pills
at refill time. And one thing to note is nerve pain is not affected by most narcotics. You might want to discuss trying Cymbalta or Savella
with your doctor to handle nerve pain. It has been working well for me this past month. As far as a holistic approach, acupuncture, massage therapy, swimming and hot baths are helpful to curb your painkiller requirements but nothing is a cure all for pain. One procedure you may want to investigate is the spinal cord stimulator implant .