When you are a person who suffers from a chronic or recurrent pain problem, one of the first types of prescription drugs that doctors are likely to try giving you to help manage that pain are opioid pain medications. However, if you are a person who has an addiction to opioids (also known as opiates), whether you have received treatment for that addiction or not, then opioid medications are the last thing you need. Addiction to opioids can make pain management for chronic pain conditions challenging but not impossible. All you need to do is get to know some of the alternatives to opioids that are available to you so that you can get your chronic pain better under control.

Massage Therapy

Massage therapy is a treatment option that can help you manage your chronic pain condition. This particular treatment focuses on the muscles in your body.

No matter what the original cause of your chronic pain disorder (a neurological or nerve condition, an injury that did not heal correctly, sickle cell anemia, fibromyalgia, etc), the pain that you experience can manifest itself in your muscles. This means that the pain you experience causes you to carry tension in certain muscle groups throughout your body (usually in the back, neck, or shoulders) which in turn can worsen the pain you experience on a regular basis.

Massage therapy can help you to reduce that pain and achieve calm and relaxation. Your massage therapist will manually manipulate your muscle tissue to rub away the tension and target specific areas known as muscle knots where the muscles are tightly contracted. By doing so, they can get those muscles to release and give you some relief to your pain as well as help you relax overall. Massage therapy is not a one-and-done treatment, though. You will need to get regular massages to continue to feel results.

Psychological Therapy

Psychological therapy is also a pain management treatment that can help you deal with your chronic pain when you are addicted to opiates. Chronic pain conditions have several effects on the body. Some of those effects are physical and others are psychological and emotional. Addressing both aspects of your chronic pain condition can help make managing that pain more tolerable. 

Psychological therapy helps to address the emotional factors that are caused by and contribute to chronic pain. Oftentimes, experiencing chronic pain can make a person feel depressed and isolated, and one of the symptoms of depression is physical aching and pain. That means your pain condition could be causing you to develop a mental health disorder that causes more pain. Luckily, standard psychological therapy and counseling, as well as mental health treatments like antidepressant medications, group therapy, and art therapy are options that can help you manage this aspect of your chronic pain condition even when you are addicted to opiates.

Now that you know some of the ways that you can manage your chronic pain in spite of your opioid addiction, you can be sure that you get the treatments you need without compromising your addiction recovery process.