Painkillers and Injections for Pain… Are They Necessary??

Are you frustrated from pain that won’t go away and looking for a natural way to eliminate it? Do you want to avoid addictive pain meds or injections?

According to Mayo Clinic, "After just five days of prescription opioid use, the likelihood that you'll develop long-term dependence on these drugs rises steeply — increasing your risk of eventual addiction and overdose. And you don't need a prescription to be at risk. In fact, most people who misuse prescription painkillers report getting them from a family member or friend." The CDC has actually reported that the sales in prescription opioids have quadrupled in the United States without an overall change to the amount of pain experienced by Americans. Another way that aches and pains have been managed are through corticosteroid injections.
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FDA has not approved of corticosteroid injections as they are dangerous and destructive to your health, they can cause weight gain, bleeding, infections just to name a few. This is because the effectiveness and safety of this drug use has not been established. Injections were not created to treat the cause of your pain or injury but just mask the pain via local analgesic components and short-circuit your pain.

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It seems normal to want to use medication when you are feeling pain. For example: When you hurt yourself it's almost instinct to use Advil (or other types of pain medications) to mask the pain. You take the medication, and you start to feel better. However, this is just a trick and the pain always comes back (your body starts to get used to the medication or injections, meaning you will need more for it to feel like it's working). Every year, millions of prescriptions are written for pain medications — many of them powerful opioids that can cause addiction and other side effects. But there are many other treatments available for pain instead of opioids. Pain medication/injections just dull your body's pain signals. The CDC recommends nonopioid approaches including physical therapy.

Here are some reasons why Physical Therapy will benefit you over pain medication:

It will do more than mask the pain

• Physical therapists treat pain through movement while partnering with patients to improve or maintain their mobility and quality of life

Exercise is medicine

• There is high-quality evidence supporting exercise as part of a physical therapy treatment plan for conditions such as fibromyalgia, low back pain, hip and knee pain.

The risk of taking opioids outweighs the rewards

• You will more than likely experience negative side effects after taking opioids or other pain killers. You could also potentially increase your chances of addiction, overdose, and depression. Due to  this, experts have agreed to  not make opioids the first line or routine therapy for pain. Rather if need be, be prescribed a low dosage or treat with non-opioid treatment plans. ​

Don’t allow pain meds or injections to take control of your life. It’s important to see a physical therapist to get to your root cause of the pain/problem rather than just mask it.

If you have questions, concerns or just want to naturally rid yourself of pain, then give us a call today. We can set up a personalized treatment plan that will treat your pain long term.

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