Approximately 7 million Americans suffer with generalized anxiety disorder or GAD. This condition often accompanies chronic pain since the pain patient understandably gets anxious over the lack of treatment of their pain or the difficulty they have finding a pain management physician to treat their pain, especially if they are tired of tried and failed invasive techniques and the consequences that may follow them.

The Food and Drug Administration has recently taken a major step forward in the treatment of generalized anxiety disorder by the approval of Cymbalta for that condition. From the pain physicians aspect this will help us achieve a lessened anxiety state in many of our patients and that will lead to lessened pain since they do go hand in hand. Previous to Cymbalta’s approval for GAD most of the anti anxiety agents available to use were benzodiazepines class medications. These medications, benzodiazepines, are effective in appropriate doses but the higher the dose of these medications the greater the chance of respiratory depression. The opioid class of medication often utilized to effectively treat our patient’s pain is also a respiratory depressant in many doses. Those two medications combined had additive effects and in rare instances death could, and would, occur. With that in mind the patient often had to make a chance of what was worse their pain or their anxiety since it was difficult to safely treat both concomitantly.

With this new treatment option it will be safer for the pain management physicians to treat both a patient’s pain and their anxiety over their pain and its effect on their quality of life. Quality of life improvement is the major goal of the treatment of pain today. Since this new approval of Cymbalta I stress that those of you suffering from anxiety over your pain and its adverse effects on your quality of life tell your treating physician of your concerns and allow him to decide if you are a candidate for additional therapy safely.

Thank you for reading our website. Remember “Pain is inevitable but suffering is not!”