Millions of Europeans suffer from conditions that require the use of prescription pain medications. These medications are given in order to relieve headaches, chronic pain, and pain caused by injuries or surgeries. While these can greatly help in restoring independence and quality of life, there are some people who become addicted to their pain medications. This is particularly true when the medications involved are opiates such as codeine. This doesn’t just mean codeine phosphate. Codeine is a component of many medications such as Co-Codamol 30/500 which contains 30mg of codeine and 500mg of paracetamol. Of course, they work. They stop pain. But when our bodies adapt to the use of these drugs and see them as something that we need in order to function, we might be fostering a chemical dependency that could be harder to resolve than the pain we were treating in the first place. Watch out for these tell tale signs of pain medication dependency to help you avoid the pitfalls of addiction.
1. Increase of Use – The most common and most obvious marker of pain medication dependency is the inappropriate increase of usage. This is made worse by the fact that you can buy co-codamol 30/500 online in the UK with no prescription. People who start to develop the need to intake prescription pain medications are causing their bodies to become more and more capable of metabolizing the drugs. This means their system eats the substance faster than it did before, increasing the frequency of feeling the need as time goes on.
2. Personality Changes – People who are addicted to pain medication often become moody, irritable, and reserved. It’s because of the hormonal changes caused by unnecessarily high usage that people experience these personality changes.
3. Decreased Social Participation – When individuals develop an addiction for pain medications, they’re more likely to withdraw from social gatherings. This might have something to do with the hormonal changes as well as the increased sensitivity that they’re likely to feel.
4. Heightened Sensitivity – As said in the previous bullet, people who develop a drug addiction are likely to experience increased sensitivity. If you start to notice that you or a loved one are becoming sensitive to things like light, sound, and movements, you might want to look into your pain medication use and consult a doctor as soon as possible.
5. Incessant Need to Obtain a Prescription – What happens if you run out of pain medications? People who are addicted to pain medicationsoften can’t cope with the thought of finishing up their supply of medication and thus seek out doctors who can issue a new prescription. It’s not unlikely to find a pain medication dependent individual driving across states just to secure a brand new prescription to breathe life into their addiction.