The Opioid Epidemic – getting to the root – this is an OpEd piece on this topic,
So much has come out about the opioid epidemic. It has devastated the people where I live.
I have experienced myself the ever-spinning mouse wheel of a medical community that only covers up the source of this problem with the quick fix found on a prescription pad.
However unintentional, the problem gets ducked in favor of expediency.
Find an answer that fits into a 15-minute doctor appointment, even if it’s not the real answer to the problem.
So, of course, the system feeding this situation is part of the problem.
How is it that finding help for my chronic pain was like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack?
And I got hijacked on my way to try and find a solution, snared in the trap of prescription pain medication that the prescribing doctors themselves were caught in – everyone putting forth the belief that these medications were the only answer to the chronic pain problem — and these medications only contributed to worsening my situation.
I met hundreds of other patients much like me caught in the same system.
Enter addiction on top of the heavy burdening cycle of chronic pain – with no end in sight for easing the suffering.
Where did our culture go so far afield so as to greatly miss the mark on bringing effective and lasting healing tools to those caught in the grip of the chronic pain cycle?
When did we as a culture decide that the answer to a problem that is estimated to affect 25% of all North Americans, children included, was to treat it with a pill that merely purports to mask the symptoms?
Notice I said “purports”, since the independent studies showing that opioid pain medication is effective for chronic pain are weak at best.
So, it may be a popular belief that opioids help chronic pain, but the studies, along with many others’ personal experience, reveals this fallacy.
I am a living example
of one who found a way to unleash the power of healing within myself and release the grip of chronic pain – and there are many more like me.
There are proven methods to teach patients how to live a life free from suffering,
but these are not the ways of, for instance, the pharmaceutical industry; and these are not the sexy, fix-it-in-a-minute solutions.
The point is that these methods work, yet the funding just doesn’t seem to be here.
Switch to the current proposed solution from the Administration. I am almost at a loss for words at how disappointed I am at how this currently stands.
They finally put their attention on the problem, and yet it appears that the solutions offered will mimic the false panacea that opioids do for chronic pain.
I can find no effort to dig deep and treat what is at the root of addiction – chronic pain resulting from untreated trauma.
Where is the funding for this, for developing programs to treat it, and for training the many doctors and therapists needed to adequately address this epidemic of so many of our citizens silently suffering?
What of our fellow countrymen and women no longer the productive members of society that they once were and could be again, if only they could find proper treatment?
What will become of the 25% of all the children in the US and Canada who suffer from chronic pain?
And the one in every six across the world?
How will they ever reach their potential?
How will society be able to afford to support these children
as they grow up untreated, suffering, and needing more and more medical care because they are caught in the very same vicious cycle that I was caught in for so long?
Opioid epidemic – getting to the root
We must solve this at a level of consciousness higher than the level of consciousness at which this problem was and is being created.
I see something a little deeper around all of this.
This phenomenon is really about something else.
We know deeply within us, even if it is unconscious, that we have come to a critical edge.
I cannot help but look at the trends and see that people are getting overwhelmed – by the pressures of deadlines, by the increased speed and onslaught of information coming at them, by a lack of education about how to effectively manage stress in healthy ways.
With more and more technological advances and less and less connection to nature and our roots, and more isolation from one another –
… we are experiencing a great sense of disconnection from the very things that make us human.
Underneath all this, is a knowing, even if unconscious, that we have lost our awareness of our essential connection to Source, the Divine, the Infinite.
We are suffering deeply from a case of separation that is taking us right to the brink.
So many of our children only know their food from a package or a grocery store and have never seen a lettuce or a potato plant in a garden or a farm, and they have no clue of what it means to see a seed sown and then grow all the way to maturity. They are experiencing disconnection.
We live in such a way that we move with all due haste through our day with this and that and believe that we do not have time to slow down and spend time in sincere and unhurried connection with each other or nature. Here there is a sense of disconnection.
When we are measured and rewarded by our doings, and our ability to just ‘be’ with ourselves is nearly wiped out of our agendas, we are experiencing disconnection.
If our fingers are pointing at someone else with respect to the problem, we have lost sense of ourselves – hence such a sense of disconnection.
I’m not saying there’s not much work to do – for there surely is… but let’s look at the source of the problem.
When one in every four children suffers from chronic pain, “just say no to drugs” when they are offered and no other solution except “say no” is put forth, how is this a solution?
Just some food for thought as we all continue coping with and doing what we can to find lasting solutions to this opioid epidemic -getting to the root.
We are all impacted by this.
Let’s stay on target by getting to the root of the opioid epidemic.
Love,
