Where The Holistic Rubber Meets The Scientific Road

Get Relief By Understanding Chronic Pain

Drug Dealer Cartels Surpassed By Doctors

Dangerous prescribing is in the news again this week, with a warning from Medscape.

My regulars will know one of my sayings is: if you want to stay healthy and live well, for as long as possible, stay away from doctors! Modern medicine can kill you!

In the Y2K year 2,000, Barbara Starfield, a public-health expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, shocked the world by doing the numbers!

119,000 people died at the hands of doctors every year in the USA alone. What was startling to me was that, of those people, only 7,000 died due to prescribing errors.

The rest died of the doses written up by the attending physician. In other words, the “correct” FDA-approved pharmaceutical drugs at the correctly prescribed dose.That’s more than the total number of Americans killed during the entire Vietnam War… every year!

It was possible to extrapolate these figures for the rest of the world but one thing emerged for certain. Here in the world’s richest country, with the highest medical costs on Earth, doctors in the main are dangerous and ignorant.

Subsequently, it emerged that Dr. Starfield’s estimates were wildly below reality. According to a more recent “evidence-based” estimate, there are over 400,000 preventable deaths per year among hospital patients. “Preventable” means it should not have happened; in other words medical blunders.2

Again, most of these deaths were due to drugs. The most commonly ingested medical drugs, in order, are: antibiotics, antidepressants, and opioids.understanding-chronic-pain-medicine

The sick part is not the patients and their diseases: the really SICK part is that over 98% of these drugs are worthless, solve nothing, enslave the individual to chemical dependency and bleed national governments white, trying to keep up with staggeringly expensive proprietary brand costs.

You might be surprised at the fact opioids were 3rd on the list. I’m astonished. These are recognized highly addictive, toxic drugs, that kill easily, even in moderate overdoses.

There have been over 200,000 deaths from prescription opioids in the USA alone and many more hundreds of thousands of overdose admissions. Millions are addicted or dependent on prescription opioids.

Opioids, by the way, means “like opium” or heroin.

In fact, it’s estimated that as many as 30% of people you meet on the street, in the coffee bar or sitting across from you in your office, have opioid use disorder or are severely dependent. The medically-created disaster rivals the scale of tranquillizer addiction in the 60s and 70s and the “Prozac nation” of the 90s and onwards.

As investigative reporter, Jon Rappoport so amusingly remarks: It puts the drug dealers in the shade. The street drug cartels, of course, are working at a disadvantage. The White Coat dealers are backed up by government, insurance companies, medical boards, medical journals, Wall Street, banks, pharmaceutical companies, media, medical schools, hospitals, and big foundations.3

The United States is facing the worst “man-made epidemic” of opioid abuse in the history of modern medicine, and it is the direct result of poor research and outdated teaching practices, according to leading pain expert, Gary Franklin, MD, MPH, vice president of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing.4

The most important step toward reversing the epidemic of prescription opioid abuse is to stop prescribing opioids for the wrong indications, he said, during an online doctors’ webinar.5

I’d go further than that… a lot further than that… and say that the best way to reduce this problem is for doctors to begin understanding chronic pain, why it happens, and how to help nature eliminate it, NOT try to beat it by literally poisoning the patient and his or her nervous system.

Pain is there for a reason and unless you address that reason, you are defying health, not helping at all!

I wrote a book about this, called The Ultimate Guide To Natural Pain Relief.

It should be required reading for all medical students, nurses and doctors. It describes a ton of alternative pain relief strategies that are gentle, effective and result in real and lasting healing, not a few hours relief only until the next dose!

Recent reports have consistently concluded that there are insufficient data on the long-term effectiveness or safety of prescription opioids to support their use in the treatment of chronic pain, but there is clear evidence of a dose-dependent risk for serious harms. So why do doctors go on using them?

Because the patient demands relief; they are suffering. But doctors cannot heal naturally and effectively and actively tell the patient, often, “We can’t do anything about the cause.”

The biggest abuse of prescription opioid abuse comes from their use for the treatment of nonspecific musculoskeletal disorders; especially chronic low back pain, headaches, and disorders such as fibromyalgia.

The American Academy of Neurology has produced guidelines that advise that in general, opioids should not be routinely used for the treatment of musculoskeletal conditions, headache, or fibromyalgia.4

It’s crazy. There is no proven benefit for their use in these disorders. As a result, patients become disabled and spill over into social security and disability systems.

Inflammation

So, what are the alternatives? The first thing to grasp is that pain has a reason. Without searching for the reason and turning that off, the patient is doomed to stay on meds and with opioids, that means DDDD: addiction or dependence… and danger.

The fact is that almost all pain is caused by inflammation. If you fall and break a bone, inflammation is the body’s rush to get healing to the spot.

You don’t need to be a doctor or medical student to work out what’s needed: active healing compounds on the spot (called cytokines), white cells to prevent invasion by pathogens (leucocytes), extra fluid for draining toxins and lastly keeping the part still, so that the injury is not aggravated.

The latter is ensured by pain! Nobody wants to move a broken bone, trust me. It really, REALLY hurts to do that!

All this we call inflammation. It means “on fire” and classically has several clearly defined elements. As students we were taught to memorize: tumor, calor, rubor, dolor, which is Latin for swelling, heat, redness and pain. We then throw in another one: functio laesa, which is Latin for loss of function.

That about sums it up.

Even without first aid, bandages or splints, or pain relief, eventually that bone will heal. Because nature is doing what she knows how to do: healing.

Chronic Pain

The trouble is, when inflammation becomes chronic, it’s not healing. Most painful conditions, like arthritis, are chronic low-grade inflammation. It doesn’t heal. It just lingers.

So one immediate healing you can guess is to reduce inflammation. Aspirin does that, which is why it’s such an excellent painkiller. But so will herbs, poultices, omega-3s and electro-magnetic treatments, all of which reduce inflammation.

Did you know, 95% of the time the best treatment of chronic pain is altering what you eat? My Diet Wise plan  is all about finding and eliminating allergy or inflammatory foods. You’d be amazed by the 10,000s of cases I’ve had, where simply eating differently shuts off pain and eliminates inflammation, quickly, cheaply, permanently and without any danger.

But to really understand pain and all the simple, natural and therefore SAFE approaches to pain relief, you need to get educated. There’s only one book approaches this sort of knowledge in any comprehensive way and that’s my own Ultimate Guide To Natural Pain Relief.

It should be on every bookshelf and required reading on every medical and health curriculum in the world.

It will relieve suffering, dramatically reduce medical care costs and offer lasting solutions to age-old problems.

Ignorance is no longer an option.

Go here to learn more about the book and its contents.

References:

  1. JAMA, July 26, 2000
  2. J Patient Saf, Sept. 9, 2013
  3. Jon Rappoport, Gut Wrenching Statistics, 9 Jun 2014
  4. Pam Harrison, US Opioid Epidemic Fueled by Prescribing Practices, September 28, 2015
  5. COCA Webinar. Posted September 24, 2015

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