Does Gabapentin help nerve pain?

Hi jean

sorry to hear you are getting all these pains coming from your spine. It looks like you have problems with your spine which are causing all your nerve pain.I take gabapentin and cocodamol

together 3x a day which helps with the nerve pain i have but it does not completely remove all the pain . Good luck at the hospital on the 18..........

I had epidural steroid injections at to lumbar vertebra on January 21. I also started on 300 mg of Gabapentin at the same time, working up by dose per week to 6 doses per week. My lower back and lower leg pain caused by deterioration of my lumbar spine are now 98% gone. This could be due to the steroid injections. However I was also having neck pain due to deterioration of my cervical spine, although not as bad as the lower back and leg pain. This pain is also completely gone so I am convinced that the Gabapentin is very effective for nerve pain. However I am having some unpleasant side effects: weight gain, indigestion and nasal congestion. I have started a gradual decrease of my dosage to see if I can reduce the side effects without affecting the pain relief.

I hope you get relief from your pain as well!

Yes it does. At least it has done in my case.

I've got a herniated disc at L5/S1 into Rh side nerve root for my leg/foot, and awaiting microdiscectomy. I was originally on Nortriptyline and boat loads of strong cocodamol. The cocodamol didn't really touch the sides, and nortriptyline was either too weak or by the time I was taking enough I was getting horrible side effects.

The main deliberation point that my Dr considered enough to put me forward for an MRI (had lower back, sciatica and genital related pain as well for months, same story as a hundred others), was that I had lost sensation in half my foot and parts of my leg. I had the MRI results about the same time I complained about the medication situation and I was switched onto Gabapentin but was told not to mix it with cocodamol as both are CNS depressants. I was put on Gaba at 300mg 3x day.

The first week, it did nothing but I stuck it out as I was told it can take a while to build up and start working. However being in pain and impatient with it, I upped the dosage a bit quicker. By about 10 days to 2 weeks I was taking 2 or 3, 3 times a day (1800mg to 2700mg/day), and since then it's been brilliant! Still on that dosage level and 95% of pain is gone. Still get an occasional pain in my foot and the loss of sensation in parts is still there, but its like in had a local anaesthetic. I've not had any side effects from it myself and its allowed me to get back to doing some light physio therapy on my lower back prior to surgery.

I've been told roughly April for my surgery. I'm considering upping the dose a bit more into the run up to it, to counter any pain post surgery, and then wean back down a couple of weeks after. Especially as lots of articles seem to suggest you get codeine afterwards but I wouldn't be able to have that and Gaba. Something I'll talk to surgeon about though, as I don't expect Gaba to help with the incision would pain, just the nerve pain.

I hope you've managed to get some pain relief anyway. Ive found that pain you have (Sciatica it sounds like), massively helped by Gabapentin but it does take a few days to kick in. It's a good painkiller in my opinion, but remember it's not treating the root cause but just masking the pain. If you can then do what you can to to help correct the root issue then that's got to be the most important. For me, I'm still off work and not heavy lifting/bending/twisting much at all to not exacerbate the problem, and still going ahead for the surgery, even though I feel a lot better on Gaba.