In 1996 I conducted research to begin developing the first clinical skills training for Addiction Free Pain Management®. What I looked for was information on people who had chronic pain and co-existing addiction.  What I found was disturbing.  There was nothing there! What I did find was a large quantity of data on people with addiction and an abundance of information about people who had chronic pain. But I couldn’t find anything that addressed someone who suffered with both conditions. 

During my research I surveyed addiction and pain programs to find out what happened to these people when they tried to seek help. What I discovered was when they went into an addiction treatment program; the entire focus was on the addictive disorder.  Unfortunately, their pain was not adequately addressed.  The addiction programs really struggled with what to do about the chronic pain. Now if that same person went into a pain clinic, the entire focus was on the chronic pain, the physiological pain.  On the other hand, the pain clinics struggled with what to do when people were acting out with the addiction. 

I realized that the focus needed to be on concurrent treatment for both pain and addiction. That is why I developed the Addiction Free Pain Management® System so treatment providers can learn how to effectively deal with both conditions concurrently.  What I also discovered during my research, was that when the person had both conditions, there was amplification, or a synergism, of their symptoms present that I coined the Addiction Pain Syndrome™.

To learn more about this syndrome and to see how it applies to Mary—one of my former patients—please check out my article Understanding the Addiction Pain Syndrome™ , 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 or a loved one is undergoing chronic pain management, especially if you’re in recovery or believe you may have a medication or other mental health problem and you want to learn more effective chronic pain management tools, please go to our Publications page and check out my books; especially the Addiction-Free Pain Management® Recovery Guide: Managing Pain and Medication in Recovery. To purchase this book please Click Here.

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.

To learn about my upcoming trainings you can check out our Calendar page. To listen to a radio interview I did conducted by Mary Woods for her program One Hour at a Time please Click Here to go to this interview.