Yeah, man, I only smoke because of my back pain

A pot/cannibais derived chemical helps with pain relief.

Heck, big deal, so does alcohol. The trick is to get one without side effects.

and notice that even with high doses, one third of the people still needed something else for pain.

The dirty little secret is that if you are zonked out, you don't feel pain...

And the second dirty little secret is that placebo works almost as well as Morphine in some patients...

LINK is one example, comparing moderate dose morphine with placebo with minimal differences in post op pain...and they discuss that maybe morphine works because it relieves anxiety...and in most studies, placebo gives partial pain relief in quite a few people, but complete relief in about ten percent of people...
In addition, the NSAID type pain medicines although no anti anxiety side effects, only stomach upset/ulcers...and in post op pain, the relief is no better than placebo in giving fairly good pain relief,

So what do we do? Depends.
Cannabais has a lot of CNS side effects, including anti anxiety, which is why people use it and why those who use it regularly are considered passive failures at life.

The dirty little secret is that ALL medicines are poisons, and have side effects.
When I worked with the retarded, when we used post op narcotics, our patients went crazy. So when the NSAIDS came out, they were wonderful...until some started throwing up blood.
SIGH.

As for myself: During one surgery I developed hypoxic cardiac arrhythmia due to asthma.
So the next surgery, when I was having pain, and I asked for something in the recovery room, she started to give me a narcotic, and I said no, because I might stop breathing...since there was no routine NSAID order, I put up with the pain until I was awake enough to agree to getting my respirations depressed.

And post op? I used Anaprox. I kept my percocet around the house for two years, and ended up flushing it unused...
I learned two things from this: One: NSAIDS are good pain relievers.

Two: You know that you have endometriosis when you use fewer pain relievers for post op pain than you do for your period...