Breast Cancer Pain Relief and Management

If you're experiencing pain from breast cancer, you're not alone. Many people have pain from the disease as well as treatments, such as surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.

But you don’t have to suffer in silence. There are many options to manage and treat pain — from medicines and physical therapy to complementary therapies such as acupuncture.

Pain management should be part of the discussion as you and your medical team talk about a treatment plan. A plan should be in place to treat any pain you have before, during, and after breast cancer treatment. And if that plan isn’t working, it’s important to speak up and tell your medical team.

It’s also important that you follow certain steps if you’re taking prescription medicine to relieve pain:

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  Take the medicine at the prescribed time, even if you’re not having pain, unless your doctor has given you different instructions.

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  Don’t skip doses.

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  Make sure all your doctors know which pain medicines you’re taking.

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  Talk to your pharmacist about how long refills take so you don’t run out of medicine; pharmacies don’t keep large amounts of pain medicines (especially opioids) in stock, so it can take a few days for orders to come in.

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  Store pain medicines safely away from children, pets, and other people who might take them.

Also called non-opioid pain medicines, non-narcotic analgesics are available without a prescription and include acetaminophen, naproxen, and ibuprofen.

Also called narcotic analgesics, opioids are effective pain relievers but can be highly addictive, especially when used to manage chronic pain for a long time.

Also called neural blockades, nerve blocks involve injecting a local anesthetic, such as lidocaine, into or around a nerve or into the space around the spinal cord. This blocks pain signals before they can travel to the brain. Nerve blocks can last for several weeks and usually need to be repeated.

Also called topical analgesics, these medicines are applied directly to your skin. They come as creams, gels, sprays, or patches and may contain lidocaine, capsaicin (the compound in peppers that makes them hot), or other medicine. These medicines also may have ingredients that make your skin feel cool or warm. Examples include Bengay and Aspercreme.

Antidepressant medicines work on chemicals in your brain called neurotransmitters. It’s not completely clear how antidepressants help ease pain. Experts think they may increase neurotransmitters in the spinal cord that reduce pain signals. Examples include Cymbalta (chemical name: duloxetine) and Elavil (chemical name: amitriptyline).

Medicines used to treat seizures also can stop pain messages from getting to the brain. They are commonly used to treat nerve pain. Examples include Lyrica (chemical name: pregabalin) and gabapentin.

Bisphosphonates are medicines used to treat osteoporosis, but they also may be used to treat pain caused by breast cancer that has spread to the bones.

Xgeva (chemical name: denosumab) is a type of medicine called a RANKL inhibitor. It is used to reduce bone complications and treat bone pain caused by breast cancer that has spread to the bones.

Corticosteroids are strong anti-inflammatory drugs. Like non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), they stop your body from making the chemicals that cause inflammation and irritation. Examples include prednisone and dexamethasone.

A physical therapist is a doctor who specializes in rehabilitation and body mechanics. You and your physical therapist can create an exercise program to improve your ability to function and decrease your pain. Physical therapy can be very helpful after breast cancer surgery and radiation therapy.

TENS sends low-voltage electrical signals to painful areas through pads attached to the skin. Researchers think the electrical signals either interrupt nerve pain signals to the brain or tell your body to make endorphins, chemicals that make you feel good and decrease pain.

These special pumps are about the size of a hockey puck and are implanted under the skin. You push a button on an electronic device outside your body to deliver opioid pain medicine to the spinal cord. This method eases pain with a smaller dose of medicine, which can help you avoid some of the side effects of opioids.

During acupuncture, sterile, hair-thin needles are inserted into specific places on the body, called acupuncture points, and then gently moved. Acupuncture is believed to stimulate the nervous system so it releases natural painkillers and immune system cells, which then travel to weakened areas in the body and relieve symptoms.

Hypnosis helps you enter into a state of calm, alert awareness and become more focused on particular thoughts, feelings, images, sensations, or behaviors. Hypnosis is usually done with the help of a specially trained therapist. Hypnosis is believed to be able to help relieve pain.

Also called radiofrequency ablation by doctors, radio waves create an electrical current that delivers heat through a needle that is inserted next to the nerve causing the pain. Burning the nerve stops the pain signal. Research suggests pain relief from radiofrequency ablation can last for many months.

If other pain-management techniques stop working, your doctor may recommend spinal cord stimulation. A device that looks like a pacemaker is surgically implanted in the lower back and attached to tiny wires in the spinal canal. When you feel pain, you use a remote control to send signals to the device, which then replaces the pain with a more tolerable sensation, usually a tingling or massage-like feeling. For people who don’t like the tingling, newer devices replace pain with stimulation you can’t feel.

If breast cancer has spread to other areas of the body away from the breast, a tumor can cause pain by pressing on nerves or organs. Surgery can remove all or part of a tumor that is causing the pain.

Radiation therapy can reduce the size of a tumor causing the pain. Radiopharmaceuticals are drugs that have a radioactive substance in them. A radiopharmaceuticals drug is injected into a vein and then absorbed by the bones where it shrinks the tumor.

People with a history of cancer who have pain are more likely to smoke cigarettes and use cannabis than those who aren’t experiencing pain, according to a 2025 study. The study also found that cigarette smoking and pain are linked to more treatment-related side effects and worse health among cancer survivors.

Cannabis

Cannabis refers to a family of plants from which marijuana and hemp are produced. These plants are grown around the world and have been used in herbal remedies for centuries. The research results on medical cannabis to ease cancer pain are mixed. A 2023 review of 14 studies on cannabis for cancer pain found that cannabis wasn’t more effective at relieving pain than a placebo.

Cannabis also may interact with CYP enzymes, which help metabolize many breast cancer drugs, including tamoxifen, Verzenio (chemical name: abemaciclib), Cytoxan (chemical name: cyclophosphamide), Afinitor (chemical name: everolimus), Aromasin (chemical name: exemestane), and Femara (chemical name: letrozole).

While pain can drive people to use cigarettes, cannabis, and other addictive substances, it’s important to know that substance use can worsen pain. Using substances to blunt pain creates a cycle that’s difficult to break and can harm your health. Before you self-medicate, talk to your doctor about all the different techniques you can use to get pain relief.