Yup, coping with chronic pain is frustrating. More so nowadays with anti-opiate hysteria tainting the issue. Too many doctors and nurses assume complaints about pain are hidden ploys to get doped up. Most of us are just looking for a cure, not a temporary fix.
And they're cautious about prednisone, as other folks said. It has all kinds of potential side effects. Among other problems, in older men it tends to cause mood disorders -- basically, 'roid rage. Happened to my grandfather and a neighbor who took it for COPD. Both older men had bouts of being almost insufferable to family and friends.
My docs are cautious about prescribing prednisone because I have osteopenia. I've used it a few times over the decades for serious respiratory inflammations, but that's all. And they prefer to try it only once a year.
Ask about oral diclofenac, or the topical version. It's an NSAID but needs much lower doses than ibuprofen. I take two small pills a day for chronic inflammation.
Also for that foot pain try
Ted's Pain Cream. Read the website. Yeah, I know, everyone with chronic pain has tried topical analgesics and they almost never work. But read this literature on this one. It can work very well when used as directed. There's evidence that resveratrol used topically can work better than oral resveratrol, and may work better for chronic pain than other common topicals -- wintergreen oil, capsaicin, arnica, many, many others.
The tricky part is, it tends to work best on old injuries that have technically "healed" but still cause lingering pain. It's not effective on recent injuries or those that haven't healed. It seems to target nerves that are stuck in pain mode long after the pain signals should have subsided.
In my case, after a shoulder injury last year (hit by a car in May 2018, broke and dislocated my shoulder, aggravated an old neck injury), Ted's didn't help at all last year. I still needed prescription pain relievers for months after the injury, and gradually discontinued hydrocodone tramadol and cyclobenzaprine on my own (I still have them, I just rarely use them). I substituted CBD, which can be effective for moderate chronic pain, and kratom for more serious pain.
But by 2019 the injury was technically healed, but still causing a lot of pain. Physical therapy helped a little. Chiropractors didn't help at all, and one made my neck pain worse. So I tried Ted's Pain Cream again starting this summer, along with a double head percussion massager. Used as directed -- three times a day for the first week or so, then once a day -- it relieved pain around my shoulder blade that had made sleeping difficult. There were spots about the size of dimes along the periphery of my shoulder blade that felt like jolts of electricity when touched. The combination of Ted's and the massager dialed it down to 3-4. There's a knotted up muscle or tendon along my neck and shoulder that has ached persistently for almost 15 years. It's down to about a 3-4, which is a significant improvement. That chronic pain used to be my main limiting factor in bike rides, usually limiting me to 20-40 miles. Now I can handle longer rides and a couple of weeks ago finished my first solo century in years. I still get some aches, especially when weather changes are accompanied by barometric pressure shifts. But it's much better.
Ted's will probably be useful only for areas just below the skin. It's unlikely to work on deep muscle or joint pain. But give it a try on the foot pain.