Controlling and maintaining.

For chronic pain sufferers and those battling addiction, there are many struggles. Finding a way to control the chronic pain that can limit life’s choices is a priority. For those families who have a loved one with an addiction finding a way to maintain sobriety can be a real challenge.

For those who are already addicted, the experts believe that it is essential to treat these patients with medications that are proven by science to work. Those providing addiction treatments also have to have a plan for the people who relapse so doctors need to be knowledgeable about medications that will help in these situations as well. Perhaps most importantly, however, is the need to treat addiction as the disease that it is. We cannot continue to look at people with these addictions as people who do not have control.
For these reasons there is a request for $8 billion dollars as a start for a recent bill that the nation is considering. These funds would address two main issues to tackle the current problem. One, structural change so that these addictions are treated with insurance like other illnesses. The second is an immediate bandaid to deal with the people who are currently struggling to save alive.

Pain Clinics Offer Both Hope and Challenges
In a time when many Americans are facing chronic pain that is debilitating, individual patients and their families need to realize that professional pain clinics can offer more than just a prescription to a medication that can become an addiction. With the use of emotional support animals and other methods pain management clinics can offer to hope to those who have felt nothing but hopeless in the past.

As a nation, we need to move away from the idea, for instance, that the current opioid addiction numbers are a one or two year problem. These solutions have to be built into the health care system so that these issues are covered by insurance. Just as the initial pain management needs special attention, so do the addiction tendencies that sometimes occur.

Unfortunately, in a 15 year period the country has increased the number of opiods that are prescribed by as much as 15 time and we have increased the number of deaths by six times. In fact, there are still doctors every day prescribing 30 days worth of oxycodone for a sprained ankle. If this were Ebola or Zika crossing the country we would contain it in a weekend, but we have too many people ignoring the problems this pain and addictions can cause.
Addiction is part of the fabric of the nation’s health. Just as we would never think that a one of two year grant for cancer would be sufficient, so why do we have this attitude when it comes to addiction. By providing the best options to the millions of people who need pain management, doctor’s can set the stage for a healthier nation. When addiction problems do develop, however, it is important to see these as a national concern that also needs to be addressed.

Professional pain clinics offer the best alternative to people who are trying to deal with chronic conditions that keep them from living a full life, while at he same time avoiding adding more people to the list of 80% of new heroin users who started out misusing prescription painkillers. The three main types of active ingredients in FDA approved medications to treat opioid dependency are methadone, buprenorphine, and naltrexone, but the even better approach is to avoid these dependancies in the first place.