Sophia Thomalla goes to her limits for documentary
Chronic pain is part of everyday life for many people. Taking medication often leads to addiction. To find out how life feels with it, presenter and actress Sophia Thomalla dares to experiment on herself.
Pain. Every day. Every hour. Every minute. Always. More than twelve million people in Germany feel this way. Usually for years. For one in five, chronic pain lasts for over 20 years. Many of those affected are dependent on painkillers, often opioids, which quickly become addictive. How does it feel to be in constant pain? And what effect do (strong) painkillers have on the body and mind? Presenter and actress Sophia Thomalla investigated this in the documentary "Schmerz lass nach! The self-experiment with Sophia Thomalla" and pushed herself to her physical limits.
Sophia Thomalla is in her early 30s and swallows ibuprofen like other sweets. She simply doesn't want to deal with pain for even a second, she says. She doesn't know what the constant intake of the painkiller can do to her body. She has never read an instruction leaflet in her life. Until the pain experiment. Thomalla herself became a patient for the documentary. The chronic pain was simulated on her body for weeks using pain simulators and treated with medication under medical supervision, and she also tried out alternative treatment methods. In addition to her journey of self-awareness, she also visited specialists and pain patients.
Doctors prescribe painkillers too lightly
According to the Epidemiological Survey on Addiction, 1.6 million people in Germany are addicted to painkillers. This is roughly equivalent to the number of alcohol addicts in the country. Doctors who prescribe strong painkillers too lightly are also to blame. According to the Opioid Report, these are mainly used for illnesses that are not at all serious. The majority of drugs are prescribed by general practitioners. Thomalla meets two women who became addicted to opioids as a result of pain treatment. While Thomalla tests the effects of ibuprofen and opioids on her own body, the two women try to get off opioids in a specialized clinic for multimodular pain therapy.
Ibuprofen is an everyday drug. It is one of the best-selling medicines in Germany. Like other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, paracetamol and diclofenac, ibuprofen acts on the nerve cells responsible for transmitting pain to the brain and blocks the messenger substance prostagladin. If the painkiller is taken for longer than ten days, this can lead to a deficiency of the neurotransmitter, which in turn promotes heart attacks and stomach ulcers. There is also a 50/50 risk that long-term use of ibuprofen and the like will affect liver and kidney values.
Opioids, such as oxycodine, tramadol and tilidine, have an even more serious effect. Opiates are very similar to the body's own endorphins, but have up to a hundred times stronger effects. Apart from side effects such as drowsiness, confusion and forgetfulness, they can be addictive after just one week. Side effects that Thomalla quickly felt. You can find out why Thomalla had to stop the opiate experiment and how the two pain patients were helped more in just a few weeks than all the treatments in the years before in "Schmerz lass nach! The self-experiment with Sophia Thomalla" starting November 15 on RTL+.
This text first appeared on stern.de
Source: www.ntv.de
