I have both neuropathic pain, and nonneuropathic pain. The former affects the side of one leg, or a portion of it, after a botched knee surgery, the rest of it, and the overwhelming majority of it, is due partly to the knee issue (I fell on an upraised dirty great spike of glass as a little kid, went straight through the patellar tendon, and I had to break it off, and drag myself home for miles, not having a phone at that age, and not long after (most of) it was taken out in hospital, I was attacked in the street, got jumped by 20 odd chavscum thugs, stamped on my kneecaps, stamped on my face, if I hadn't pulled a knife, I've little doubt they'd have killed me, as it was, they fucked off, I collapsed, and they just left me for dead.
Got worse and worse as the years went by, and the change it forced on me in my walking gait caused trochanteric bursitis, bilaterally, and it hurts like the holy mother of all fuck. To say nothing of the way the nerve damage causes a permanent severe contraction of my calf muscle without the ability to properly relax it, although the otherwise unabating, fucking painful spasm is relieved by a hefty dose of tizanidine.
The difference on and off opioids is dramatic. I had to walk what would be 5-10 minutes to get a tram yesterday and another walk to my destination after getting off at my stop. It took me a couple of hours at least. And by the time (I was down to a few meager scraps of H, congealed from vapor in a pipette modified into a pipe, that stopped full-blown maximum hell withdrawals) I got home, I could barely stand, and had to spend the rest of the day stretched out on the sofa, even sleeping on the sofa, today, I picked up a few grams of good heroin, and I can walk about the house no problem, I could even do the journey on foot to where I went yesterday without near enough howling in the street with pain.
Went from agony, to just a bit sore, after the first few pipette-loads of the gear. Its either take the morphine and oxy (and when its available, boxes of physeptone (methadone tablets) and whenever the money is spare, I'll get myself an 8th of H, and of course, since I'm on morphine, it has a habit of mysteriously turning into dipropionylmorphine, plus there's a nifty little trick someone taught me about a high yielding demethylation and 6-monoacetylation from dihydrocodeine to 6-monoacetyldihydromorphine, a truly excellent opiate. (thanks, btw, you know who you are) using 30% anhydrous hydrogen bromide in glacial acetic acid. DHC (albeit shitty weak stuff that I'd need to CWE boxes of for a single dose) is OTC here, so those several boxes, or make that a shopping-bag full of 32 count boxes, can end up as something much, much more potent.
Either way, it does fuck all (excluding the methadone, which has some, albeit weak, NMDA antagonist effects, and which does actually relieve the neuropathic pain) for the neuropathy, but the rest of it, any of them, can allow me to sit down, lie down, and have a life, albeit with the ball and chain of physical dependency, as opposed to an existence which would limit my walking distance to more or less the house, or at very most, the local shops or nearby doctors clinic (ten minute walk for most, about twice that to 25-30 minutes for me, and after it, my joints would be down on their hands and knees, begging with all their might for some sort of opioid)