JetJock1,
Talking about going without pain meds cold turkey can be very very horrifying & very very dangerous. When I had back surgery last June 1, they thought they gave me too much pain medication right after surgery as I was in the kind of pain that I would have willingly taken my life over. Not only were my feet in a flare from hell with RSD, my buttocks & leg muscles were twitdhing & cramping from the surgery. I kept crying & screaming to let me die, to just let me die. I started throwing up from the pain even. I could be wrong but I have had 15+ pain with this RSD in the beginning & felt that if God called me home I would go willingly, but after surgery I was in 25+ pain & truly begged them to let me die. The doctor thought I was a darn alcoholic, he kept asking my family if I was & when I drank blah blah blah. He just wouldn't believe I wasn't one because the way I was behaving is how an alcoholic behaves when detoxing. Anyway he stripped all the meds out of me with Naltrexone. And it stripped everything out of me & when I say everything I mean everything. I was basically catatonic from late Monday to late Thursday. And then it took until Sat before I could say who the president was. I didn't know who I was or anyone else for that matter. When asked I said Richard Nixon was the president. When I started to come out of it after a neurologist told them to put me back on morphine they were giving me shots for diabetes even. And I am not diabetic nor have I ever been diabetic. The only way they could keep my BP normal was with 2 meds & I don't have high BP either. They had to give me thyroid meds, magnesium, potassium & even a multi vitamin who knows what else. I mean when they give that crap to you for that purpose, it strips everything. My blood work was all over the place & nothing was normal for days. Anyway no one should ever go cold turkey in any form off of pain meds. It almost killed me literally. Then I almost ended up in a skilled nursing center & then a nursing home because of what happened to me. So I don't advise cold turkey at all.

Luckily the back surgery was a success after all that.

DebbyV