Lupin,

While tranquilizers and anticonvulsants can take the edge off of your pain, any relief comes with four big costs:

- Both classes of drugs have side effects such as dopiness, fatigue, and confusion. It scares me that people drive while taking these drugs. If you think that PN pain is bad, try living with a serious motor injury, or causing the injury or death of another.

- Both classes of drugs have to be eliminated by the liver and kidneys, adding to the stress on these critical organs. Most of us are older than 40, borderline diabetic or diabetic or with metabolic disorder, and are taking drugs for other chronic health problems such as hypertension, arthritis, cholesterol, acid reflux, etc. Our livers and kidneys are already working harder than when we were younger. You cannot be healthy with an unhealthy liver or kidneys.

- If the drugs provide pain relief to a tolerable level, many users stop the search for health and healing from PN. PN tends to get progressively worse without an aggressive program of healthy diet, supplements, exercise, and becoming mentally and spiritually calmer (i.e., getting rid of anger, guilt, frustration, and other stressful emotions). To me, it's like putting a bandage and soothing salve on a skin cancer.

- The body inevitably adapts to the drugs and the person becomes drug dependent. I don't mean addicted in this case. By dependent, I mean that any attempt to reduce drug levels results in increased pain, worse than the pain when the person started using the drugs. That makes it difficult for people to stop using the anticonvulsant or tranquilizing drugs once they start.

For these reasons, I'd hope that as much as possible people try the non-drug therapies suggested in this forum, with drugs as a last, not a first resort.

Doctors push pills. That's their training, to first intervene with drugs or surgery. Unfortunately, the available drugs for PN pain are neither totally safe, nor very effective.

Physicians' training is to not trust alternatives, of which they are generally dismissive and ignorant. There are alternatives that work, and are throughout this forum. I'd hope you consider trying those alternatives in a concerted program for health before you go too far along the drug path.