Oxycodone for shingles pain?

If you’ve ever had shingles, you know how painful it can be – especially if it’s not caught early enough to take the antiviral medication. That’s what happened to me about four years ago when I had shingles. I didn’t know what it was until it was too late.

One of the things I remember the most was not only how much it hurt, but how tired and run down I felt. Just awful. And then there’s the itch too. Not fun at all.

Treating shingles (herpes zoster) pain is hard because it’s nerve pain (neuropathic pain), the toughest there is to treat. Some doctors prescribe gabapentin, which has some success in treating nerve pain, but it doesn’t help everyone. I remember that not much helped me. But researchers have published a study in the journal Pain , that has found that oxycodone is effective in helping relieve shingles pain.

The researchers looked at 87 people who had shingles, half of whom tookk oxycodone and the other half a placebo, a sugar pill. More than half of the patients who took oxycodone reported at least a 30% improvement over their pain level.

Managing pain in shingles is important because many who have shingles go on to have a complication called postherpetic neuralgia. This is a condition where the pain continues along the shingles line, long after the lesions have healed. For some people, it’s mildly painful, for others, it’s excruciating.

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