“I had also used arts and crafts previously in my own experience to help with healing. Including the previous year when I had a breast cancer recurrence did many crochet projects and took classes in mosaics making as I navigated from victim to su…
Category: Pain Management
Allow patients to continue their opioid of choice while starting microdoses of buprenorphine
Twenty-six hours into the shakes, sweats, crawling anxiety, and gripping nausea of opioid withdrawal, Faye caves in and takes a couple of fentanyl tabs. She knows that she must tough out a couple of days without fentanyl to start Suboxone (buprenorphin…
Current pain treatments and their deficiencies
An excerpt from The Pain Solution: 5 Steps to Relieve and Prevent Back Pain, Muscle Pain, and Joint Pain without Medication. The U.S. health care system is designed to handle emergencies. It manages life-threatening heart attacks and acute fractures we…
Listening to pain in our younger patients [PODCAST]
“As a family physician for more than 40 years, I have seen countless patients struggling to alleviate chronic pain, with far too many turning to self-destructive coping methods such as alcohol and opioids. Unfortunately, the struggle with chronic…
I see so much of this in pain management
In 2017, the CDC rolled out a “solution” to the opioid crisis. The recommendations, which were never intended to become laws, were mostly level of evidence three or below. To put it another way, they were not robust, nor were they based on …
Phoenix pain clinic touts new office as ‘lower-cost’ alternative to ASCs
Arizona Pain recently launched an office-based procedure suite in Phoenix that the company’s CEO and founder called a lower-cost alternative to ASCs in an April 6 LinkedIn post.
The true story of morphine milligram equivalents
They are the foundation of the CDC’s 2016 opioid guidelines, resulting in legislation limiting opioid prescribing in 36 states. Morphine milligram equivalents, or MMEs, are used to set arbitrary prescribing limits for opioids by physicians since …
Art as a tool to manage pain
My niece and I look across the expanse of the second floor of Marshall’s Dranko Library as we take in the library’s Spring art exhibit: Creation in Confinement. We spot my moon drawings on black paper hanging on the opposite wall. As a new artist, acco…
Coal mining culture and the opioid crisis [PODCAST]
“For me, my own personal stories of opioid patients come to mind, including one who keyed my car when I stopped prescribing his opioid after an acute injury. I think of some local opioid overdose deaths in my community. I would love to hear what …
Breaking down the real cost of the opioid epidemic
I have been writing of late about recent developments in the opioid saga. My first piece talked about a fresh decision in California’s seven-year-old The People vs. opioid pharma case. The next one focused on how the middle-man, distributors, con…
