wide O............i understand where you are coming from.
Lyrica was very costly here up til a few months ago, as was gabapentin off label.
i am just fortunate i get gabapentin cheaply from my neuros hospital via some deal they must have with the government or some subsidy .......dont know the details.
it did not apply to Lyrica tho.
now the government subsidises Lyrica for all of us and can be had cheaply via GP prescription

my GP and neuro have always been pretty pragmatic about it and said they had patients who it worked for/or not.
if nothing else works and if you can afford to buy it........try it.
i think that now it is so much cheaper there will be a move to try more people on it because it is cheaper and because there is always the hope it might work. as i have understood it it was designed for nerve pain so i suppose peoples hopes are raised.
in discussing it today with the emergency doc he said he felt it was worth a go if people are distressed.
again a very open ended kind of discussion with a doc i dont know, but who was very pragmatic about discussing pain management generally and some drugs specifically that were relevant to me /or not.

the Pfizer study is interesting in light of the study done here a few years ago now where diabetic neuropathy patients were given Vit D when found to be low .
there was excellent results for approx 50 % as i recall.
i was low on vit d when i heard of it and immediately packed in the vit d with no results on my pain but i gained a normal vit d again.
the study deliberately excluded those with PN of unknown cause and only used diabetics.
i asked my then poditarist to ask one of the docs, who he knew, a bit more about the study and if they would repeat anything with a different subject group.........but he disappeared and i never heard anything further.

it is also interesting in light of a pain killer i have taken called Doloxene which has been banned overseas for sometime. it is currently unavailable here and leaves me high and dry as i am allergic to all forms of morphine or morphine look alikes.
there were several reasons for taking it off market and one was the belief that it was not working as anything other than a placebo.
for me..........that is not the case .
interesting

so yes i guess i have always known that Lyrica was problematical.....same as many think gabapentin is.
or put it this way........the people who treat me are not pushing any drug but rather saying when u reach the point where u cant stand the pain .....then these are the drugs we will try for you......plus a few other drugs for other people who are not me. !!

i am sorry u did not succeed. i have no feelings either way about it and no real expectations . a poll elsewhere (not a medical related group) was pretty much more negative than positive when i asked at the time i had to decide on what to take .......so i went with the gabapentin. sort of scary how drugs are chosen !!!


but i think i will still be willing to try Lyrica again when my joints settle and bruises disappear.


[QUOTE=Wide-O;978688]I'm not sure if this is what you want to hear, and I'm also weary of writing this, as I'm sure there are people who feel it's working perfectly for them.

But.