Today I want to discusses some of the issues I’m seeing both locally and around the United States regarding the war on pain management. I believe that a supply side war on prescription drugs is bound to fail just as it has on the DEAs war on street drugs. I hope to encourage everyone to become more proactive in speaking out. Some of the ways to speak out are to call or write your elected officials and let them know this “war” is hurting innocent people and we cannot condone this type of “collateral damage.”

This week I met with four new pain patients who were sent to me because they’ve been on opiate pain medication for over five (5) years.  One of them needs to get completely off the opiates as he did get into either pseudoaddiction  or addiction.  The other three need to reduce the opiates and add some other medication interventions along with some non-medication based interventions.  If these people were in Florida they would most likely find themselves out in the cold without any medication. In Kentucky they’ve just passed a new law regarding prescription pain medication and I’m still waiting to see if it will help or further harm innocent pain patients and well-meaning pain providers.

Don’t get me wrong; I know there are pain patients and healthcare providers that deserve to be shut down.  However, this is just a small percentage of the total.  This is one reason I developed the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System.  Many people think this means my system is “medication-free” but it does NOT mean that at all. 

I believe people need to have the core three components I developed this system around: (1) Effective and Safe Medication Management; (2) Non-pharmacological (non-medical) and Holistic Interventions; and (3) Addressing the Psychological/Emotional Components of Chronic Pain.

Unfortunately, we are in this problem of so many people having problems with pain medication because most providers (due to insurance companies and Workers Comp systems) only prescribe medication as they mistakenly believe it’s “cheaper.” We are now finding out it is not cheaper.  In fact, the Institute of Medicine in June 2011 estimated we are spending well over $600 Billion on chronic pain management for as many as 116 million Americans.

Join me as one of the voices that shout out for change.  Please watch my video below to learn more.

You can learn about the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System at our website www.addiction-free.com. If you are working with people undergoing chronic pain management and want to learn how to develop a plan for managing their chronic pain and coexisting psychological disorders; including depression, addiction and other coexisting psychological disorders effectively; please consider my book Managing Pain and Coexisting Disorders: Using the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System. 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 receive an autoresponse email that you need to reply to in order to finalize enrollment.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 4th, 2012 at 9:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.