If you suddenly feel severe pain in a limited area on one side of your body, you may have shingles and need treatment right away to prevent the pain from lasting the rest of your life. Shingles is chickenpox the second time. It’s called postherpetic neuralgia and when you have severe pain that isn’t caused by an injury and your doctor can’t find a cause, you should have a blood test for shingles and start Famvir or Valtrex right away to prevent the pain from spreading. return permanent.
The first time you get chickenpox, blisters form on most of your body. After a week, your immunity clears the chickenpox virus from your bloodstream, but it remains in your nerve roots for the rest of your life. One in six people who get chickenpox will have the virus escape from the nerves many years later to cause painful clustered skin blisters over the infected nerve on one side of the body.
If you wait for the characteristic blisters to form, it may be too late to prevent the pain from lasting the rest of your life. Fifty percent of people over the age of 60 who develop shingles and are not treated will develop postherpetic neuralgia and have severe pain in that nerve for the rest of their lives, while less than 7% treated with acyclovir will experience permanent pain. Cortisones offer little protection. If you develop postherpetic neuralgia, the pain may be treated with 0.025% capsaicin (pepper) cream and tegretol or gabapentin anticonvulsant tablets. A report in the New England Journal of Medicine offers a more effective treatment for postherpetic neuralgia: 60 mg of methylprednisone, injected directly into the cerebrospinal fluid, once a week for four weeks, relieves and even cure the pain.
