Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

These work almost as well as the prescription-strength variety (but only because they are 80% of the prescription dosage). If you tried them and didn't think they worked, you probably put them in the wrong place on your body. The rule of thumb for getting topical pain relief is to put the anesthetic "between the pain and the brain." This means you have to position the patch where it will interfere with the pain signals before they reach the spinal cord. To do this, use your favorite online search engine and in the search box type DERMATOME CHART. The hits you get will be of anatomical drawings that are striped with alphanumeric-coded segments (beginning with C, T, L, or S). They indicate the spinal nerves that receive pain signals from particular areas of the body. You may have seen such charts in a chiropractor's office. Download the drawing(s) of your choice, and study them carefully to find the right placement for a lidocaine patch. For example, you may have pain in your shoulder joint, but if you put the patch on top of the joint, you will probably not get relief, because you're anesthetizing the wrong set of nerves (in this case, cervical nerves). Put the patch in the axillary region (in or just below the armpit), where you will access the thoracic nerves, and you'll get pain relief. As with any flexible, sticky product, these patches can be hard to handle without crumpling them, but that's just the nature of the beast. They are thinner than the prescription variety, but that can be an advantage for conforming to skin folds. The patch can also be cut in half, for a better fit (a patch that's too big will come off easier). Be sure the skin is clean and dry before applying a patch, but no topical drug delivery system will stand up for long to sweating or friction (clothing or bed linens), so you may want to cut corners into curves or tape down edges to aid adherence.