tolerance, which is defined as an increasing dose of a drug needed to achieve a desired result. Tolerance, if it develops at all, does not develop suddenly, and doctors can respond to its development by increasing the dose you are taking. Remember, narcotic medications do not have a "dose ceiling." If you no longer get pain relief at one dose level, the dose can be increased again and again. The sky is the limit.
Myth 4. Narcotics are dangerous because they can make breathing harder for a terminally ill patient.
Morphine and other narcotic drugs are not dangerous respiratory depressants in patients with cancer and pain. Doses are gradually increased and tolerance to the respiratory-depressant effects of these drugs usually develops before tolerance to their pain-relieving effects.
Myth 5. People taking narcotics always have to get shots since narcotics are poorly absorbed by mouth.
Most narcotics are absorbed very well when taken orally. A fair amount of the dose taken by mouth is "lost" to non-target body tissues and therefore wasted, however, so larger dosages of the drug are required than the doses needed for shots. The pain equivalency between oral and intramuscular (shots) morphine is 3 to 1 when taken over time, meaning that 30 mg of oral morphine is equivalent to 10 mg of morphine by shot.
