Chronic pain is the most common reason for antidepressant prescriptions in older adults. Yet researchers have found no evidence that the drugs are effective for this purpose and consistent evidence of harms, such as increased risk of potentially deadly falls in older people.
Now, a new systematic review and meta-analysis have confirmed that there is no evidence for long-term use of any psychiatric drugs for chronic pain. The researchers did find that two drugs, duloxetine and mirogabalin, appeared to have short-term effects on fibromyalgia pain. But for other conditions—and for long-term help with any condition, including fibromyalgia—there was no evidence of an effect with any of the drugs that have been studied.
“No consistent long-term benefits were observed for any of the drugs studied, raising questions about their sustained efficacy in chronic pain management,” the researchers write.
Despite confirming years of previous data showing a lack of efficacy for the drugs, the researchers still argue against “prematurely concluding” that psychiatric drugs are “ineffective or unsuitable” for pain relief.
The study was conducted by more than 20 researchers across the US and Italy, led by Shahana Ayub, Anil Krishna Bachu, and Lakshit Jain. It was published in Frontiers in Pain Research.
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Despite years of research confirming the ineffectiveness of psychiatric drugs in relieving pain, the authors of the report nonetheless warn it would be “premature” to discontinue their use. When, may I ask, WILL the time come to reach a contrary conclusion? After countless billions of additional dollars are spent and an untold number of people suffer needlessly from the side effects of neurotoxins?
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It’s not surprising that psychiatric drugs repeatedly are shown to be ineffective against pain is it, given that no psychiatric drug has ever improved long term out comes on any known mental or physical condition, so I think everyone working or producing for Mad In America need to have a serious, deep and penetrating conversation about the radical inefficacy of almost all your efforts to raise public consciousness on this issue. The critique of psychiatry is only complete when it is a means of penetrating and exposing the much greater, much vaster, much more fundamental problems which produced it in the first place. Otherwise, you are just part of the vast world of confusion which is to say this vast structure of confused and confusing life activity, this endless twitching structure of old patterns of socially conditioned life activity, the very thing that has lead to all the social pathologies around us including psychiatry, psychopharmacology and what we call ‘mental illness’. I’m afraid what I say is a certain and clear fact and I’m just waiting for you lot to catch up, if you ever do. This is not debatable for me at all, and anyone who doesn’t see how superficial and ineffective all this is needs to wake up and smell the coffee, because the mere smell of the coffee will wake you up and transform you. It is an unthinking and ineffective to approach everything through mere intellectual critique or the coverage of new studies showing us only what we already knew. But do we know that society and psychiatry and psychiatric drugs are all neurotoxic? And so too is a critique of these things when conducted intellectually and without emotion or passion which is the proof that you care and the force behind your efforts to transform that which you care about. Only emotion, feeling, passion leads to transformative action, and feeling is generated by seeing, not thinking. Emotional action is also healing – what we call cathartic, and you lot are a papers breadth from grasping this because you already have the emotion – you just can’t see the problem of not putting it into anything but intellectual action. You will ossify and petrify in your office chairs just like I am right now if you don’t get around to understanding this, and your emotions will bubble along the night sky groaning, looking for succour of any kind.
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I totally agree from my personal perspective. And there is the venn diagram overlap where such pills are given for pain but you suspect its given by doctors diagnosing depression or anxiety and they assume that it is somehow causing pretendy pain in the body, which in apparently suceptible people is all muddled. If I could use an emotion to stop bodily pain I’d have superpowers. Yet there’s an assumption people use pain to stop emotions. An elderly relative had antidepressants given for pain, in the doset box. Amytrippppp….etc for years. I think its murky.
Anyway, I am still getting messages that The Hoover Dam will flood everywhere downstream. The prophecy is still coming. When the Dam explodes it will cause a political stir to say the least. But that’s not the major message beyond it. The planet will be hit by small meteors. Five. Tiny but able to cause huge tsunamis. That global flood will be like Earth’s baby bath. It will destroy places, a bit like in the recent flashfloods. People will need to form communities. And a lot of poisonous structures will be washed away. In many ways A Flood has been marvellous at speeding up renewal. A new Earth is going to rise out of those retreating waters. Loss puts love into focus. Valuing eachother becomes important. In the run up to such times there have been stirrings and stirrings and mixings of opposing views. Almost like a quickening or a tour of human troubles and consequences. As if destiny is asking us to ponder…”Is this what love looks like?”.
There is a bright future over the bridge away from past devastation.
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What I mean in my last comment is that “I totally agree” with the article itself written by Peter Simmons. I am neither agreeing nor disagreeing with any comments thereafter. I was tired in my wording at the outset.
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Someone has mentioned a notion of emotional action. Before I leave I would like to share my understanding, if I may.
To “act” tends to mean an outward physical motion. So “action” implies this. But usually any outward “action” has one nanosecond of “executive thinking” prompting such outward display. The thinking pushes on a lever or switch that has a backlog of inward turmoil explode outwardly. Even if the exploding seems wild the thinking is often still there coercing the display to be directed at a specific point or person. All this “thoughtful” mind based nanosecond planning is analytical. It is lots of thinking mingling with the discomfort of suppressed emotion. So “action” whilst giving a sense of “release” of backlog of discomfort, in a lashing out, might not be simply sitting and loving all of one’s own feelings. Letting felings flow is hugely healing. So much so, the urge to keep lashing out diminishes since a sense of self love is found within.
The violent may use an “intellectual idea” that “acting out” inward emotions in explosive ways is natural and so justified. This harnessing of emotion to excuse destruction and the traumatizing of others is not my own notion of emotional freedom and emotional balance. Fully feeling arrives at compassion and calm, not numb kinetic lashing out. Change comes best via a compassionate route where possible. But I am a passivist mystic who understands that the best way to create peaceful people is to accept their feelings and help them accept their own feelings. Feelings are not outward behaviour. I dont like violence as it is usually born of “a disconnect” from inner feelings. This permits “numbness” and behind most violent “acts” there is “numbness”. Lashing out as an “act” does not “care” anymore. There is just a wilful wish to “act” in order to “control” that which is deemed to oppress emotional freedom externally. But a wish to control may come from inner fear of being “out of control” within…of a backlog of powerful resisted feelings kept at bay. Bottling up feelings brings huge stress. Fully feeling lets fear and stress flow and go…until the body relaxes. But there is a difference between letting feelings flow for oneself inwardly as it were, through crying or frowning, and just the sort of kinetic rampaging numb planet changing spree that seeks healing via “everyone else gotta change or else!!!”. When the whole planet is full of everyone explosively insisting that others have to be controlled this brings yet more oppressive laws and rules from the “thinking” mind.
I am not against “thinking” or “action”. Sometimes both are vital to survival. And oppressive regimes DO need toppled. I am just aware that sometimes Totalitarianism may come in the mantle of “healer”.
This is just a breadcrumb, of food for thought. No one has to swallow it.
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