The Pain of Shingles

Treating the pain of shingles when you can’t prevent it. This is Dr. Steven Andrew Davis, Speaking of Health. Such an innocent sounding word, and yet “shingles” is one of the most feared by patients and frustrating to doctors. Shingles is everybody’s lay term for herpes zoster, the chickenpox virus that re-emerges years after chickenpox infection to inflame a nerve path and the overlying skin. Shingles usually occur only once in a person’s life, but when it does come on, both the pain of the acute attack and the lingering neuralgia can, in some cases, be disabling.

In the last few years, new drugs have come on the prescription market to treat shingles, but even they don’t guarantee that the patient won’t have long-term pain. Some people continue to get throbbing, stabbing or shooting pains months or years following their acute attack of shingles, but despite all this, the outlook isn’t entirely bleak. Dermatologists now have prescription creams which can sometimes help; neurologists can try a variety of drugs that affect the nerve endings to mute the neuralgia of shingles; and anesthesiologists and pain control experts can inject nerve centers with agents like cortico-steroids to anesthetics. Some nerve-stimulating electronic devices can also be employed to counteract the nagging, though usually slowly subsiding pain of shingles.

The bad reputation of shingles, then, is deserved, but medicine’s ability to deal with both it and its aftermath is getting better all the time. For a copy of this article, please visit our website, www.speakingofhealth.com. I’m Dr. Steven Andrew Davis for CBS News.