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The Use of Methadone in Refractory Headache Pain in an Opiate Naive Patient with Non Metastatic Burkitt’s Lymphoma and HIV - A Case Report
Mitchell Stotland* and Helen Rahimzad
Department of Internal Medicine, University Hospital, New York, USA
- *Corresponding Author:
- Mitchell Stotland
Department of Internal Medicine USA
Tel: +81-84216483
E-mail: mstotland17@gmail.com
Received date: November 23, 2016; Accepted date: December 21, 2016; Published date: December 26, 2016
Citation: Stotland M, Rahimzad H (2016) The Use of Methadone in Refractory Headache Pain in an Opiate Naive Patient with Non Metastatic Burkitt’s Lymphoma and HIV - A Case Report. J Pain Relief 6:280. doi:10.4172/2167-0846.1000280
Copyright: © 2016 Stotland M, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
In extreme cases Methadone has been used for severe pain in oncologic patients; frequently cancer patients have severe headaches in addition to their pain. This patient is a 50 year old Hispanic female with metastatic Burkitt’s Lymphoma and controlled HIV on triple therapy. Throughout her inpatient hospitalizations of chemotherapy with R-EPOCH and then salvage chemotherapy in addition to pancytopenia she experienced consistent pain of 9-10 out of 10 on the pain scale and headaches of 9-10 in severity out of 10. The patient underwent various methods of pain and headache control including PCA of hydromorphone, intravenous and oral hydromorphone, intravenous morphine, intravenous Tylenol, Fioricet and oral analgesics. The patient received moderate relief with oral Methadone of both her pain and headaches, bringing the pain and headache scale down to a 4-5 out of 10. This is the first case of intractable pain and headaches in an opiate naive patient with non-metastatic Burkitt’s Lymphoma and HIV that received with 50 percent reduction in symptoms from the addition of oral Methadone that has no prior use of opiate abuse or dependence.
