What I Learned About the Opioid Crisis Last Weekend

Dear Patients & Friends,

Last week, I mentioned that I was going to be attending a huge chiropractic conference in southern California called, California Jam. Thousands of doctors attended from all over the world to see the top speakers in the profession.

My close friend, Dr. Leslie Hewitt (President of the California Chiropractic Association) and many of the other speakers talked about the opioid crisis in our health care industry.

I learned that this epidemic crisis of over-prescribing opioids to patients has destroyed individuals and families throughout the country. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that the total "economic burden" of prescription opioid misuse alone in the United States is $78.5 billion a year, including the costs of health care, lost productivity, addiction treatment, and criminal justice involvement.

How Did This Happen?

In the late 1990s, pharmaceutical companies reassured the medical community that patients would not become addicted to prescription opioid pain relievers, and healthcare providers began to prescribe them with increasing frequency. This eventually led to widespread diversion and misuse of these medications before it became clear that these drugs could be highly addictive.

In 2015, more than 33,000 Americans died as a result of an opioid overdose, including prescription opioids, heroin, and illicitly manufactured fentanyl, which is a powerful synthetic opioid. That same year, an estimated 2 million people in the United States suffered from substance use disorders related to prescription opioid pain relievers.

Also, 591,000 suffered from a heroin use disorder. It's estimated that about 80 percent of people who use heroin first misused prescription opioids.

What Will Help This Epidemic?

The National Institute of Health (NIH), the nation's leading medical research agency, is helping to solve the opioid crisis by researching new and better ways to prevent opioid misuse, treat opioid use disorders, and manage pain. To accelerate progress, NIH is exploring formal partnerships with pharmaceutical companies and academic research centers to develop:

1. Safe, effective, and non-addictive strategies to manage chronic pain.
2. New, innovative medications and technologies to treat opioid use disorders.
3. Improved overdose prevention and reversal interventions to save lives and support recovery.

Everyone in the audience was especially receptive to the research presented throughout the weekend, which clearly proved that chiropractic treatments are far more safe and effective than opioids for musculoskeletal conditions.

Obviously, chiropractic, massage therapy, acupuncture, diet, stress management, and exercise are excellent treatments for muscle, joint, and bone pain.

Please, do your best to let your friends and family know that they don't have to succumb to unnecessary drugs when they have pain. There is a wide world of helpful alternatives to the mainstream medical method of dispensing drugs and performing surgery.

In Health,
Dr. Mark

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