So it seems that some of us have had stable and generally favorable experiences with opioids and/or narcotics, while others have not.

Hopefully, we are not too far away from the time when smaller doses of opioids/narcotics will be able to be “potentiated” with precisely titrated micro-doses of “mu-opioid receptor blockers,” such as Naloxone, which should alleviate many of the negative side effects of currently available medications, with the hope being that the time is not that far removed that drugs will be available that produce only a pure analgesic effect. (Trust me, a great deal of money is currently being invested in the race to get that one right.)

But in the meantime, a couple of questions:

Can we simply agree that individuals have different reactions to opioids/narcotics, and in the absence of some to-be-developed genetic testing or a personal or family history of narcotic addiction, it is difficult to predict how well anyone will fare with them over time?

Second question, and getting back to what the doctor told KyMarie, has anyone ever had pain from CRPS that has not been temporarily relieved by a sufficiently high dose of opioids/narcotics? (Whether or not you ultimately developed a tolerance.) And the list of medications would include, for the sake of argument, those as powerful as Methadone, morphine sulfate, hydromorphone (Dilaudid) and oxymorphone (Opana).