It depends on what kind of injury you have and the level of pain you are in.Hydrocodone is generally prescribed to be taken every 4-6 hours as needed.If it's not really helping your pain that much you may need a higher dose more frequently or need to be put on a stronger pain med.Hydrocodone has never been that effective of a pain med IME and I have always found oxycodone to be much more effective.I have chronic pain myself and it drives me crazy,keeps me awake,makes me irritable etc....I finally convinced my new doctor to put me on the oxy I was prescribed before moving after having to suffer with the very ineffective hydrocodone/APAP 10/325s.If I were you I would stress to my doctor how inadequate the Vicoden is.They may want to up your dose to 7.5 or 10 mg hydrocodones but if you need chronic pain management and your pain is pretty bad you are probably going to need something stronger.How long have you been prescribed this?Doctors generally like to establish a baseline and then determine what you need from there and go with the lowest effective dose.This is especially true for chronic pain management because they know that in a couple/few years you are probably going to need something stronger and if they put you on something too strong now then you will eventually reach the point where nothing works.
Last week I went to the hospital for my spine pain. I have done pain mgt in the past, but for the past year I have decided to tough it out. It got bad, so since I couldn't get any appointments soon, I went to the ER.
The ER looked at my extensive illness, ran a bunch of tests and thought I had another stroke (I had an actual stroke in August), so they rushed me to a bigger hospital. All the pain complaints went to shit and weren't really well-documented.
They sent me home with 12 5mg oxys /4hrs.
My doc appt was like 6 days away.
So 3 days after coming home from the stroke center I went to the ER and said I need more oxys to cover until the doc appt!
They wrote me 12 5mg vicodins /
6 hrs
Yesterday I went to the doctor's appt, and his fax was broke, however he was able to send a referral to the Pain Mgmt.
Today my primary doctor will write me some 5mg script to last exactly to the pain mgt. Hopefully which i can communicate to write 4hrs.
It's all stupid that someone with a documented illness should basically be punished for not taking pain meds every day, when they actually have an increase in pain.
