Shall We Get to the Root? The Underbelly of Addiction

The sense of superiority, and completely unwarranted I might add, that I have experienced in the medical world is staggering. Before I knew better, I allowed this attitude to dominate and reinforce the belief that if I wanted to heal, I would have to find it ‘out there’ in the medical world. WOW! Was I ever reaching in the wrong direction. I finally learned that it was up to me to take responsibility for my healing. A doctor can set a broken bone, but he cannot do the healing – only the body knows how to heal. I had to look deep underneath my dis-ease and address the root of my illness of chronic pain. You know, the stuff that no pill in the world can do anything except drop a veil down over – the real problem. I had to look long and hard for doctors and other health care practitioners who were adept at looking below the surface in order to address the core cause of my dis-ease.

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. 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 as to so 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 it 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 there are no independent studies that show that opioid pain medication is effective for chronic pain. So it may be popular belief that opioids help chronic pain, but the studies, and my along with many others’ personal experience reveals this as 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 they actually work, yet the funding just doesn’t seem to be here.

Switch to the current proposed bill in Congress: The Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2016. I am almost at a loss for words at how disappointed I am at how this currently stands. We finally got Congress to pay attention to the problem, and yet it appears that the solutions offered in this bill 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 resultant 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? 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?

Now I wasn’t exactly born yesterday. I have spent time on the battlegrounds of working tirelessly for a cause all the way into Congress and even to when legislation was made into law. Too many times what resulted was a much watered down version of what those of us involved in the problem at the ground level felt was truly needed to get to the root. To wit: Big Pharma has 1300 lobbyists in Washington, D.C.; there are absolutely zero lobbyists representing “the chronic pain lobby”. Will we ever be able to rise above the tide of the power and entrenched interests of such a group? And how many of the current millions of addicts came to be so because they came in through the path of treating persistent (non-acute and non-cancer caused) pain with opioids, when really what is at the root of their sickness is unrecognized and untreated chronic pain to begin with?

I will continue to write and speak out when and where I can. I will do whatever I can to help those who are suffering to find their way out of the chronic pain cycle – this is my commitment. But I am only one person in quite a big ocean. We need an army of people to turn their attention to the mounting crisis of chronic pain and the ensuing addiction that is erupting in our society. Anyone with me on this?

#LivingBeyondChronicPain #GetToTheRootOfAddiction #ConquerChronicPain  #kippinitreal