If your experience is anything like mine, It is probably going to be a long drawn out and painful process. It can beat you down so badly at times and so very angry at the medical system. The same system that says that no one should have to live in pain anymore. Such hypocrisy. I don’t think the vast majority of doctors have experience with pain or understand the severity of pain that you have, or I had. I’ve been on Tramadol (max dose) and more recently morpine for over a year now with significant relief. (as well as Lyrica and Cymbalta, max dose). Before that I intentionally spent a year specifically NOT taking any narcotics to prove that I wasn’t displaying “drug seeking behaviors.” That’s just crazy--let’s not give him what he needs because he wants it.

Before that, I kept trying to explain to an ever-expanding list of MDs about how much pain I was in. And almost all of them said that they have “never heard of that” or that, “regardless of what’s happening with my symptoms what I really need is to exercise and eat a healthy diet.” Which I don’t disagree with, by the way, but it just sounded so #*#&^* trivial to me at the time. One of those doctors was the one who told me that we would never understand the condition that I have if we disguised it with pain medicine. Thankfully, that same guy, three years later, finally referred me to a pain management specialist. I don’t think these folks mean to be barbaric and so I cast my vote for ill-educated. I think I finally wore him down with my incessant searches for non-effective methods of pain relief. It took over five years to get pain relief. The system is biased toward conservative approaches to treatment. I think that you may have to be the one to save yourself through knowledge and persistence. Best wishes.