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It’s pain awareness month, which means it’s important to highlight the importance of compounded pain medicine and all it’s great advantages for pain relief.
The month of September is termed Pain Awareness Month. The goal is to raise awareness amongst people regarding physical pain and how to manage it effectively.
A lot of people live in physical pain on a day-to-day basis due to different medical conditions. While on the outside, such individuals might seem to be completely normal, living a fully active life is a dream for many. With the advancement of science, patients are able to have an increased functioning and quality of life while minimizing suffering.
With the right skills, medication, and support, people can manage their physical pain effectively and lead a fairly normal life. In certain cases, it means building a healthy relationship between the patient and health care service provider. Alongside that, compounding medication can work wonders for some patients. The key is to never give up and be determined to find a suitable solution.
Compounding Medication and Certain Facts
Treating pain in the human body is an amazing example of how much/or how little science knows about medicine. We all know that the same medication can have different impacts on different individuals. Science still needs to make a lot of progress in regards to neurological differences in the perception of pain.
Medical conditions in the human body interact with each other in unexpected ways it makes diagnosing and addressing the pain extremely difficult. Certain medications can contraindicate with the use of other drugs, making the options of pain management very limited. That is where the compounded pain medication comes in and offers patients relief.
Facts About Compounded Pain Medicine
For those of you who are not aware of what compounding is, we‘ll try to explain it in the simplest manner possible. It involves stripping down the medication to base elements and formulating it in a manner to suit the individual needs of patients. The benefit of the compounded medication is fewer side effects and reactions.
If you have tried everything else for chronic pain, it’s time to give compounding pain medication a try.
Importance of Compounded Pain Medicine
Let’s dive further:
Combo Medications
For every kind of pain, whether it be neuropathic, fascial, muscle, organ, cancer, or visceral, there is a drug available that works best for a particular pain type. There are medications that address only one type of pain while others address all of them but are not as highly effective.
With the help of combination medication, you can counter the pain with minimal side effects and very few doses. Instead of keeping a track of multiple pills, you will have to take only one or two pills to manage your condition.
You can use one medication to treat multiple conditions; pain and allergies, pain and infection instead of popping in multiple formulas.
Control over Dosage Level
Managing your dose is the primary job of your pharmacist. It is especially common for pain relievers because there is a risk of tolerance and high risk involved. For instance, NSAIDs can cause various stomach-related issues in people.
In certain cases, doctors are resistant to increase the dosage of narcotics due to the risk of sedation/addiction. If that is the case, compounded numbing agents that are applied by patch, gel, cream enhance the effects by relieving subdermal and surface pain. The compounded medication works wonders for patients with musculoskeletal issues.
Compounding medication is not only suitable for adults. It works for children and pets too. In children, liquid solutions to combat pain minus the side effects work really well. The same is the case with pets.
Easier Dosing Formats
If patients are struggling with chronic conditions, they usually have to take multiple medicines that can include large pills, injections, and certain bitter drugs. Altering the consumption method of these medications drastically improves the quality of life for these patients. For instance, giving a child a bitter anti-biotic is a task on its own. Similarly, older adults forget to take multiple medicines. That is where the compounding comes in and offers:
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- Adding flavor to a medicine
- Changing pill to an injectable
- Changing injectable to topical
- Dissolvable lozenges
- Creating liquid medication
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Wider Treatment Options
There are certain conditions where oral pills are out of the question (patient cannot swallow the pill, oral cancers, extremely young children). That is where compounding becomes necessary to widen the treatment options and in certain cases, becomes the only suitable solution.
Topical creams work amazingly well for treating the surface-level pain on the skin than narcotics. They temporarily turn off the nerve signals which offers instant relief. Products that contain NSAIDs work wonders for patients undergoing Rheumatoid Arthritis whereas pills take much longer to start working.
Similarly of a patient who is recovering from a stroke or any other major illness can benefit from a change in dosage format due to their lack of ability to swallow pills. In this case, an injection seems more suitable. Essentially, compounding is done to ensure the medication fits the patient and not vice versa.
An Essential for Hospice Patients
Hospice patients have specialized needs when it comes to effective pain management. End-of-life care is very complicated and health professionals aim at achieving as much pain control as possible without causing sedation. A lot of patients face extreme complications as a result of the overdose.
Compounding medication comes in the best interest of such patients not only in terms of pain management but also in terms of patient’s dignity, respect, and safety.
Final Thoughts
Firstly it is important to raise awareness in people about the intensity of pain patients go through and how it affects their day-to-day lifestyles. Raising awareness is the only way forward if we wish to build a supportive community around those suffering.
Right awareness, pain management tools, compounding, together can work to improve pain management and help patients live a comfortable life. It also reduces the confusion surrounding the number of doses required per day, gives better control, easy formats, and allows patients to better manage their pain.
It is in your best interest to speak to your healthcare service provider or a pharmacist to see whether compounded pain medicine is right for you or not.