If you’ve suffered from chronic pain due to illness or injury, you’ve probably been prescribed a painkiller before. When you take your prescription exactly as your doctor instructs, you run very little risk of becoming addicted. If, however, you begin to take more than your doctor prescribed, or you find that you need to take the medicine more frequently than you were told to, the danger for addiction becomes very real very quickly. 

Pain medicines such as Oxycodone, Vicodin, Demerol, and Morphine carry powerful opiates that your body can become dependent upon very quickly. It is normal for someone who takes a pain medication for a very long period of time to build up a resistance to the drug, which means your doctor will need to prescribe higher doses to give you the same pain relief. If you follow your doctor’s advice you should be fine. If you begin to alter your regimen on your own, however, you may find that you begin a spiral of taking more and more medicine to achieve the relief you desire.  

Pain medications can be very difficult to stop taking once you become addicted. You have to slowly reduce the amount of medication you take carefully to avoid uncomfortable withdrawal symptoms. Sometimes it may seem that the detoxification process is more painful than your initial reason for taking the medication. Detox can be accomplished with the proper care and supervision of a trained health professional.