Gabapentin alternatives/pain relief ideas

Hello

My husband has SP, recently while discussing symptoms with someone they reported that they could not tolerate gabapentin as it caused so many problems with balance.

This is a major issue for my husband and he decided to decrease gabapentin and see what happened. He said his balance was much better, but pain, especially headaches has increased to the point where they are not tolerable.

He is taking LDN, Nortriptyline, fluoxetine, simvastatin, and prochlorperazine, high dose vit D.

So has anyone else found this to be a problem? Any ideas for alternatives that might have fewer side effects? What he needs is pain relief without the wobbliness! Nortriptyline did help at first but does not seem to be doing much, but of course you dont know until you stop.

(MS nurse post is vacant and neuro appt. is for August).

Thanks for any ideas.

Hi, I use amitriptyline for nerve pain and it works quite well, without wobbliness for me.

Side effect is dry mouth, so I always have a bottle of water with me.

luv Pollx

I use Amitriptyline too. I also went to the pain clinic where I was given Butron patches, which contain a mild opiate based drug. I was also given a course in Alexander Technique and Tai chi. I don’t know if your husband is able to do any of these exercises but they do seem to help me.

Take care

Wendyxx

Hi

One possible alternative that has no side effects is using mindfulness for pain management.(if you google mindfulness and pain management you’ll find more about it.)

I’ve been doing simple mindfulness exercises generally for a while, though not specifically for pain management (I’ve been doing some free ten minute ones on the getsomeheadspace.com website). Basically it just involves noticing what’s going on in the moment - different bodily sensations, your emotions, things you can hear… It doesn’t sound anything special, but I’ve found it’s somehow helped my sense of wellbeing, and I value and appreciate things a lot more. As a little example, food tastes nicer.

Like I say, I’ve not done anything specific for pain management but one way I can see how it could help is how I respond to having an itch. Normally I’d think I’d need to scratch it straight away, but now by simply noticing it, it helps isolate the feeling. It’s a bit hard to explain but it’s almost as though it removes me from the feeling of the itch. Then for some reason, the feeling of the itch just gets less. It might sound a bit weird, but it seems to work. So when it comes to pain, if I had painful legs it can be easy to think ‘I am in pain’, but actually that’s not true - the vast majority of me won’t be in pain - my ears won’t be or my arms or back etc. It won’t even be true that my legs are in pain - it will be more true that just a small part of my leg hurts, and that helps reduce the pain somehow.

It sounds like it shouldn’t work, but I reckon it’s worth giving it a go.

Dan

Ok thanks, will suggest that he try the recommendations. I know he has tried the amitriptilyene, cant remember now why he came off of it. But it seems to me that for every drug action there is an unwanted reaction.

hi

i use amitriptyline and very good no wobbliness

like pollx said i have dry mouth too

good luck

steve

WOW Dan-thanks!

Some have said that I am bonkers in the way that I have been attempting to deal with recent pain-which has been ‘talking’ to my body. I imagine that I am speaking to the cells that that they work efficiently as they are meant to… I have been lucky to remain taking a small amount of medication (Amytriptyline 25mg nocte) for MS hug which is darned painful when I move my torso BUT I ‘ask’ that my intercostal muscles feel the same as *insert part of body thats not painful.

After writing that I have perhaps just reinforced that my thinking aint the same as most-ho de hum! Whatever gets us through eh?!

Ellie x