I am a big believer that everyone should find a doctor they like and then take his/her advice, not try to get medical treatment form a forum like this, but it is interesting to hear what other people take and think and discover. So I am not recommending what I say, just throwing my two cents worth in. I feel like with narcotics, they have been around a long time, and there is a huge amount of data on them and their side effects and what happens long term and the fact that people who take them for pain relief rarely get addicted. They are not perfect, but we do know all the parameters about them. Now I take Lyrica, but with this and the other, newer, drugs, we really have almost no body of knowledge about them: how they will affect our health long term, what they might be doing to us in the way of side effects, etc. So I really do not understand why so many doctors are so hesitant to prescribe stuff like the fentanyl patches (a narcotic -- which I also take). The new stuff may turn out to be much more harmful in the long run -- or even the short run. It really frustrates me that people in terrible, life changeing pain are made to take all these new drugs in lieu of narcotics when they haven't even been tried on the best narcotics, like fentanyl, to see how they tolerate them or respond to them. I think it makes sense to try narcotics before going on a bunch of new stuff, or trying a bunch of expensive, less effective stuff like biofeedback and relaxation crap that has never been documented to be effective for severe chronic pain. So that is my two cents.