tramadol

[Piecrusl1]

I don't take tramadol just for RLS i have osteoarthritis as well so I can't come off them at the moment

[SueJohnson]

Is it helping your osteoarthritis?

[ChrisColumbus]

UK NICE, Versus Arthritis, and others are generally opposed to the UK prescription of opioids for osteoarthritis, with the general view that tramadol doesn't help much. The usual recommended prescriptions are for topical/oral NSAIDS, paracetamol in combination with an NSAID, or a drug such as co-codamol, but you've presumably tried these and feel that tramadol helps more?

The following study concludes:

"Moderate quality evidence indicates that compared to placebo, tramadol alone or in combination with acetaminophen probably has no important benefit on mean pain or function in people with osteoarthritis, although slightly more people in the tramadol group report an important improvement (defined as 20% or more). Moderate quality evidence shows that adverse events probably cause substantially more participants to stop taking tramadol. The increase in serious adverse events with tramadol is less certain, due to the small number of events."

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl...