Interesting Scenario - Medication

[Guest guest]

Since April of this year (2008) I've been seeing my new pain

management doc. and each month I have my appt., get a new Rx for the

two medications, get them filled, and am set for the month, with an

appt. made with the pain doc. for the same date the following month.

Since about September I've experienced a hell of an increase in pain

and have been conveying this to the pain doc. My visit with him

yesterday entailed more of the same, and I told him I want to pursue

further ANYTHING to achieve better pain relief. It has been that

bad. The appt. ended with a plan that at my next appt. we'd start

some other tests, and either I go back to the revision surgeon, or

find another ortho surgeon to check to ensure all of the hardware,

bones, etc. are still OK and explore the reasons for the extreme

elevated pain. If I hadn't done any of this by the next appt. then

pain doc. would assist me in an ortho to see and/or our action plan,

he gave me the Rx for the next month's pain management & I made my

January appt.

I then took the Rx to the same pharmacy I use for everything.

Usually when I bring this particular Rx in (both meds are on on form)

the girl will have me wait a second so the can verify that they have

them in stock, advise they do & I leave it to be picked up later.

This time they didn't do that and when I returned I was told they

were out of one of them, that they both had to be filled at the same

time, and were nice enough to have called other pharmacies to find

one that had both of them in stock. So I took it to that pharmacy,

got them filled, came home, took the usual dose as I had used up the

previous Rx's on schedule.

(I can't believe I said all of that just to say the following)!

What I noticed was a marked difference in the effectiveness of the

medication. One of the two is a long acting and you don't feel the

effects right away, it builds in your system. The other is for

immediate pain, take as needed (like your basic pain pill). I even

checked the bottle to see if the doc had changed the dosage but it

was the same. I did notice that the little pill was more solid than

the other prescriptions, other than that, no difference, except the

effectiveness.

This makes me wonder if I've been getting older medication from the

pharmacy that had lost a lot of its effectiveness over time. I know

everything has a shelf life/expiration date and that the chemical

compounds change or can change but I don't know exactly what those

changes are and if the strength of the intent weakens - I'm not a

pharmacist.

This is only my second day on the new prescriptions and I feel a

tremendous difference in my level of pain, along with some of the

side effects, so I could be way off base with my assumption here...

I'm not saying all of this with the intent of malice, but I've been

on a level of pain and depression for the past 3 months that I was

ready for more surgery, ANYTHING for relief. Could my elevated pain

be a result from medication that had lost its effectiveness? It

makes me wonder about things like had I still been receiving pills

from that same bottle that was old, if I would have pursued further

surgery or treatment, not because something else was wrong but

because everything was the same except that my medication had merely

lost its strength. Moreso, I wonder if and how many times others

might have fallen into a situation like that and perhaps had

unnecessary or non-beneficial surgery because their pain got so much

worse but in reality it could have been that their medication got

less effective.

That's all - I'm going to closely monitor my level of pain with the

new prescription from a totally different pharmacy chain (totally

different batch with a totally different manufacture date-presumably).

G