The Dark Side of Opioids for Pain Relief
In a recent broadcast, “Why Opioid-Related Deaths Continue to Rise and What Can Be Done to Reverse the Trend,” popular National Public Radio host and author Diane Rehm touched on the central problem of doctor-prescribed opioid pain killers: they are highly addictive and too easy to dispense. Under the culture of quick fixes, doctors readily hand out prescriptions when a milder, less abusive option is available.
The fact is these medications are not safe. Nearly 20 percent of Americans already take at least five or more prescription drugs regularly and rarely, if ever, are these prescriptions cross-checked. In a startling statistic on causes of death in the U.S., total drug overdoses from prescribed medications, including opiates, killed more Americans than firearms or motor vehicle accidents. The crux of our nation’s heroin epidemic stems from legally over-prescribed opiates. Nearly four out of five current heroin addicts state that they began using illegal drugs only after being prescribed opiates by doctors for pain.
The risk of addiction is high, whether for school athletes, parents of young children or seniors. Physicians have been giving out way too many prescriptions, and in their defense, patients also do not want to leave the office without a scrip. In her new book, Drug Dealer, M.D. – How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It’s So Hard to Stop, author and psychiatrist Anna Lembke, M.D., points out that we live in a society that does not want to feel pain.
Lembke states that this change in thinking about pain marked a radical shift in America’s attitude from a century ago, when the medical community thought that pain made patients stronger. “Doctors believed that pain was salutary, meaning that it had some physiologic benefit to the individual, and certainly some spiritual benefit,” she notes. Today, not only do doctors believe that pain is something they must cure at all costs, but also patients have become less willing to endure it. Further complicating the whole transaction is that for too long there has never been any oversight.
Now, with the advent of prescription drug monitoring programs, the easy prescribing habits of doctors have come to a halt. Still, pain is real, and very often patients are the ones having to manage it. A better to approach pain relief is to target the different ways in which pain is produced. It’s not about adding more and more, but about treatments complementing and enhancing one another to reduce inflammation, alleviate anxiety, decompress nerves, increase metabolism, lower toxicity and reduce unnecessary pills.
Studies have shown that cholesterol-lowering statin drugs such as Lipitor and Zocor are a primary predictor of pain. Likewise, an 11 to 18 percent reduction in body weight significantly decreases the severity of pain. By taking a holistic, functional approach to pain relief, patients will find there are numerous ways to restore quality of life that can be sustained into old age.
Dr. Doug Pucci practices in Oradell, NJ, and is the author of You Are Not Your Diagnosis.
For more information, call 201-261-5430 or visit GetWell-Now.com.
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