Chronic pain is a serious health crisis confronting many people today.  According to recent research it currently affects well over 100 million American adults and is estimated that an excess of $100 Billion per year is spent on medical costs and lost productivity. 

Pain is disabling for many people and sometimes there are few safe alternatives available when they are seeking help.  As a result, patients end up suffering or developing an addiction to the medications that they are using to help manage their pain.  Rod Clovin in his book Prescription Drug Addiction states that in 1999 over 9 million people reported abusing their prescription medication.

By 2003 there were over 117 million people with chronic pain and 11.7 million people experiencing either abuse or addiction problems with their prescription medications.  Also, people who are in chemical dependency recovery face potential relapse or sometimes death from their addiction as a result of an untreated—or mistreated—chronic pain condition.

According to researched published in Pain Physician Journal (2006), 90 percent of people in the US receiving treatment for pain management are prescribed opiate medication.  Of that number 9 percent to 41 percent had opiate abuse/addiction problems.  We also know that at least 80 billion dollars is spent for pain relief in the United States each year—a significant amount of that is for prescription medications.  What is harder to quantify is the emotional cost to family systems when one or more members suffer with a chronic pain condition.

Yes our current chronic pain problem in this country is costing us in money, time, energy, lost relationships and much more. That is why I believe that using a multidisciplinary approach in chronic pain management is crucial and not to do so is unethical.  I also believe in treating the whole person and working with people—not on them—is a much better solution.

To learn more about effective chronic pain management please check out my article The Need for Multidisciplinary Chronic Pain Treatment that you can download for free on our Ariticles page.

You can learn more about the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System at our website www.addiction-free.com. If you are working with people in chronic pain and want to learn how to develop a plan for managing their pain and medication effectively go to our Publications page and check out my book the Managing Pain and Coexisting Disorders: Using the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System. To purchase this book please Click Here.

To listen to a recent radio interview I did conducted by Mary Woods for her program One Hour at a Time please Click Here to go to this interview.

To read the latest issue of Chronic Pain Solutions Newsletter please Click here. If you want to sign up for the newsletter, please Click here and input your name and email address. You will then recieve an autoresponse email that you need to reply to in order to finalize enrollment.