I came across a website I’d like to share with you; Health24.com.  I found a report that discussed recent research regarding people who were HIV Positive and were experiencing neuropathic pain symptoms.  One area that I found significant was up to 62 percent of HIV-infected patients develop extensive painful neurological pain extending into the legs that is either due to the disease itself or is a side effect of HIV drug treatment, according to a report in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management.

I’m including a portion of the report on the efficacy of using the capsaicin patch from Health24.com below and if you want to read the entire report please go to that website and search for Patch helps brain pain in HIV+.

The patch was applied once to affected areas for 60 minutes. The main outcome measure was the percent change in a pain rating scale score from the start of the study through two to 12 weeks after treatment.  Treatment with the patch produced a sustained reduction in pain scores of roughly 40 percent on average over the follow-up period. A treatment response, defined as a 30 percent or greater reduction in pain, was seen in eight patients (67 percent), including four with a 50 percent or greater reduction.

Most patients experienced an increase in pain during the 48 hours after the patch was applied, which resolved in the first week after treatment. Patch gives long-lasting relief except for the expected local pain and redness, “NGX-4010 was tolerated well, and no safety concerns were identified,” the investigators report.

“The most important finding is that the high-concentration capsaicin patch produced long-lasting (i.e. at least three months), significant pain relief in HIV-associated peripheral neuropathy with a good safety profile,” Simpson said. While encouraging, the results will need to be replicated in controlled trials, he added. “This is an exciting time in research of new treatments for neuropathic pain,” such as HIV-related pain, shingles and diabetic neuropathy, “with new drugs on the horizon.” – (Reuters Health)

The capsaicin patch could be a much needed tool for many people experiencing neuropathic pain symptoms and find that other pain management medications (e.g., opiates or SSRI’s) are not helping or have to many side effects. 

Now we also have other non-opiate and ”recovery-friendly” transdermal patch delivery systems.  A transdermal patch is a medicated adhesive patch that is placed on the skin to deliver a specific dose of medication through the skin and into the bloodstream.

This type of delivery system promotes healing or relief to an injured area of the body. An advantage of a transdermal drug delivery route over other types such as oral, topical, etc is that it provides a controlled release of the medicament into the patient and avoids many of the side effects people experience when taking medication orally.  A wide variety of pharmaceuticals can be delivered by transdermal patches e.g., Lidoderm (lidocaine), Voltaren (NSAID) and other NSAIDs (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medications).

Of course medication management is only one component of an effective pain management treatment plan.  I believe that people also need to be developing nonpharmacological interventions as well as learning to better manage the psychological/emotional components of their pain.  For those symptoms cognitive behavioral and rational emotive therapeutic interventions give the best outcomes.

To learn about the need for multimodal chronic pain management please check out my article The Need for Multidisciplinary Chronic Pain Management that you can download for free on our Article page.

If you’d like to receive training for helping people with relapse prevention, I’m very excited to announce that the Gorski-CENAPS Corporation is presenting The Relapse Prevention Therapy44 Hour Certification Training in Ft. Lauderdale October 18-22, 2010. To learn more about this 5 day 44 hour training  you can check out our Calendar page.

You can learn about the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System at our website www.addiction-free.com. If you are working with people undergoing chronic pain management and want to learn how to develop a plan for managing their chronic pain and coexisting psychological disorders; including depression, addiction and other coexisting psychological disorders effectively; please consider my book Managing Pain and Coexisting Disorders: Using the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System. To purchase this book please Click Here.

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 9th, 2010 at 9:30 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.