Pain Management for Cancer
Living with cancer means coping with the effects of the condition, including pain. Cancers of all kinds, including mesothelioma, can be very painful. Most cancer patients are prescribed medications to help them manage the pain, but pain management plans have to be customized to suit each patient’s individual needs. With a thorough pain management strategy, you can reduce the impact of pain on your quality of life.
The most common and most effective treatments for pain include opiate-derived medicines. Morphine, which is derived from opium poppies, is used as a painkiller for numerous conditions, especially in a hospital setting. It is not commonly used at home by cancer patients, however. Instead, doctors can choose from a wide array of both natural and synthetic opiates to help patients manage pain.
Although opiates are a very good all-around treatment for pain, there are other drugs that can also be used, depending on the type of pain in question. There are many different types of pain, and some medicines can treat some types better than others. Cancer pain is often neuropathic pain-in other words, pain originating in the nerves themselves. Cancer can cause damage to nerve fibers, and some chemotherapy treatments can cause neuropathic pain as a side-effect.
There are many antidepressant and anticonvulsant medications that have proven effective for neuropathic pain. While these medications cannot treat other types of pain-for example, pain caused by physical trauma-they can work very well for cancer pain. There is an ongoing debate over the effectiveness of medicinal marijuana in treating pain, but there has not yet been enough research into its potential usefulness.
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If you or someone you love has been diagnosed with mesothelioma, there are numerous options available to you for pain management. For more information on pain management options for mesothelioma, or for any other mesothelioma related concerns, contact the compassionate mesothelioma lawyers of Williams-Kherkher today at 800-781-3955.
