#FAQF... "Addiction? Opioids? Heroin?.... Physical Therapy?"

 “Addiction? Opioids? Heroin? …Physical Therapy?”… Ok so I get that this isn't really a question but Addiction and Opioid abuse have become a tremendous epidemic in America over the past few years and it hits close to home for just about everyone I know. In fact, the CDC reported 33,091 overdose deaths in 2015 alone, and the U.S. Surgeon General reported that over 21 MILLION Americans in 2016 suffer from drug and alcohol addiction. That officially makes this disorder more common that cancer!
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This disorder knows no gender, race nor socioeconomic group. No one is immune. In fact, one of my former patients is an ER room nurse at a prestigious hospital in Santa Monica and she told me that the drug of choice in Santa Monica is heroin. HEROIN!
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YES. This is a DISORDER! As a society we need to drop the stigma behind addiction, and as a medical community we need to hold ourselves accountable for being a part of the problem. The use of Opioid pain medications has quadrupled in the US, despite an overall change in reports of pain. So IMO that means as a medical community, not only are we not actually treating pain, we are in part responsible for the 91 Americans that die every day of an Opioid overdose. This is where Physical Therapy comes into play.
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Pain is complex. Pain is misunderstood. Pain is confusing. But pain is our body’s way of asking for change. Not an addition to mask the pain. A true change.
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I have decided to take the next few posts to breakdown some Pain Science in bite size portions in order to spread the word that there is another option. Opioids are not the only choice.
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So I leave you with a quote from C. Shante Cofield in hopes of beginning to open your mind to the science behind pain… pain occurs when “the NERVOUS SYSTEM senses a problem and is asking for you to fix it. True pain is NOT something that occurs in the tissues. Rather it’s the summation of your environment and experiences in your past”. -AAW