Are Antidepressants Being Prescribed to Treat Chronic Pain?
When the average person thinks to treat his or her chronic pain with medications, generally they look for pain medications like Tylenol, Aleve or Advil. However, it is getting more and more common for some patients who are suffering from chronic pain to be given antidepressant medications.
While treating pain with antidepressants is not an approved use for the drugs, it happens all of the time anyway. Various different antidepressants are used to chronic pain, but tricyclic antidepressants like Tofranil or Anafranil appear to work better than SNRIs like Effexor or Prozac. SSRI medications like Paxil and Zoloft have shown no real benefit as a pain treatment. According to information from The Mayo Clinic, the chronic pains that antidepressants are said to help with include "arthritis, diabetic nerve damage, nerve damage from shingles, tension headache, migraine, fibromyalgia, low back pain and pelvic pain."
So far, it is not exactly know just how the antidepressants work at treating pain, but some believe that the drugs might help to increase neurotransmitters in the spinal cord that reduce pain signals.
Still, these drugs don't work immediately — in fact, it often takes a week or so before a patient begins to feel some relief.
The fact is that antidepressants like Paxil, Effexor and Prozac have been proven to be very dangerous. Studies have shown that the drugs can cause serious adverse side effects that have the potential to make the patient suicidal. Aggressive behavior has been noted in many patients taking antidepressants — even that patients have been driven to act out with homicidal behavior.
To make matters worse, other studies have shown that antidepressants work no better than placebos at curing depression symptoms, which is causing many doctors to balk at prescribing the drugs at all. Instead, doctors are prescribing lifestyle changes, better nutrition and talk therapy. With all of the potentially deadly side effects linked to taking antidepressants, it seems unnecessarily dangerous to prescribe it for pain. If you want to know about the benefits to taking antidepressants for treating pain, contact your doctor and be sure that you fully understand the risk-to-benefits ratio before taking the drugs.
