We continue to publish the blog of Boris Prilutsky, MA, LMT. In this issue, Boris discusses the important topic of pain medications and their impact on patients’ lives and therapists’ work.
Dr. Ross Turchaninov, Editor in Chief
INCREASING UNWILLINGNESS TO BEAR EVEN THE SLIGHTEST DISCOMFORT
Running across this article, ‘Prescription drug abuse surged 400 percent in past decade – CSMonitor.com’, I was amazed at how much this topic resonated with my own thoughts, those that I had been mulling over for a while and that were troubling me. A new White House study found a 400 percent jump in prescription drug abuse between 1998 and 2008. Experts blame a lack of monitoring programs as well as their fellow Americans for that.
“We are in a culture of immediate gratification and nobody will put up with even the slightest discomfort anymore.”
From my perspective, that is a very strange explanation. Technically, it is not even an explanation but a statement of professional incompetence when the lack of correct treatment is blamed on the patients’ unwillingness to cope with chronic pain. We are all aware of drug addiction and its terrible outcomes. Of course, “slightest discomfort,” according to the terminology used in the White House report, is not life-threatening. Why, in such a case, are people jeopardizing their health and even their lives by consuming “legally prescribed” opioids while they are in ‘slight discomfort’? People know about the danger of opioids, and still they use them. We have only two possible explanations: people are generally stupid, or they simply don’t have any other option.
I think what pushes people to take drugs is the exhaustion and desperation due to constant suffering from chronic pain, frequently triggered by a simple accumulation of everyday stress.
I have no doubt that, similarly to illegal drug cartels, Big Pharma knowingly pushed and encouraged the medical community to prescribe opioids to secure future multibillion-dollar profits. We lock people up for selling the same opioids on the street, but we are OK with prescribing them to a patient just to give him or her something and get the patient out of the medical office, since there is nothing left to offer.
A few months ago, I watched a TV show about the opioid epidemic in the USA. One of the guests was an MD from Ohio. I believe he held an important official medical position in the state. He clearly stated: “We didn’t know that opioids were so addictive. Pharmaceutical companies ensured us that it is safe to prescribe opioids.”
I couldn’t believe my ears! What did this SOB do in medical school? Did he completely miss pharmacology as a discipline during his studies? No, he was a classic liar. He and those of his colleagues who claimed that they didn’t know that opioids are addictive should not be in medicine to start with, and I strongly believe that their medical licenses must be revoked.
Our modern life is a constant source of stress and worries, from acts of terror, fluctuations in the economy and overwhelming social media to everyday worries at work and at home. So, stress crawls onto us from all the cracks of modern life, constantly attacking us until it eventually triggers pain and other discomforts. It leads us to an obvious but critically important statement: The normal reaction of the human body to physical or emotional stress is an increase in resting muscle tone. Such an increase becomes the first steppingstone in the formation of somatic abnormalities in the form of tension in the skin, fascia, muscles and periosteum.
Now let’s look at a possible option to control stress and anxiety. Yes, exercise, yoga and meditation can do that, but only to some level of chronic stress accumulation. If there is a significant imbalance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic divisions of the autonomic nervous system, these tools have their limitations. Yes, some medication is prescribed. However, the most powerful tool to control the level of stress and balance the autonomic nervous system is massage therapy, and it is very frequently missed at the very important early but still reversible stages of stress accumulation.
Why then are massage therapists, who are primarily responsible for controlling stress levels and maintaining balance within the autonomic nervous system, not actively involved in the fight against drug addiction? I think it’s because, as an industry, we have failed. One of the reasons is that the massage therapy community is deeply divided and detached from modern medicine. Therefore, the general public, as well as the medical community, has a hard time choosing among thousands of alternative names used for massage therapy nowadays.
I regularly observe the development of so-called ‘new’ modalities, which promise breakthroughs in treatment while in reality they are repackaging already existing and clinically tested methods and techniques or, in many unfortunate cases, are ‘new’ modalities that don’t make any clinical or even physiological sense.
There is no doubt that we have to work with physical therapists and chiropractors for the sake of patients, but if the massage industry as a whole can’t find even basic common ground and produces more and more professional division, with everyone claiming to be the answer, we will continue to fail the public, and we are going to be partially responsible for the “400 and much more percent jump in prescription drug abuse.”
Category: News
Tags: JMS 2019 Issue #3
