Your Stories About Medications
Learning how to better manage medications when living with chronic pain: Laurent’s story
Discover Laurent's story with medications and their side effects. Laurent took many medications to manage his chronic pain, and with the help of his healthcare providers was able to regain his quality of life through deprescribing. We sincerely thank Laurent for generously sharing his story with our Network.
Discover Laurent’s story: a member of the Quebec Pain Research Network, who lives with chronic pain and has a lived experience with deprescribing.
Laurent was seriously injured in an accident when he was young. Since then, he has been taking prescription medications to manage chronic pain. Over time, the number of medications gradually increased - at one point, he was taking 15 or 16 a day. Despite all that, the pain didn’t go away. In fact, many of those medications were only treating the side effects of others, creating what’s known as a prescribing cascade.
Laurent realized that his medications weren’t helping him achieve his health goals, they were actually making his quality of life worse. So he decided to speak with his healthcare providers. Together, they began a full review of his medications.
Together, Laurent and his care team started a deprescribing process - that is, reducing doses or gradually stopping certain medications. This approach helped improve his quality of life. Today, Laurent is down to just 4 medications! He also supported the deprescribing process with non-pharmaceutical approaches such as physiotherapy, psychotherapy, and peer support groups.
