New!
I think you might like this book – "Healing the Brain, Second Edition: Pain and Chronic Pain" by David Balog.
Start reading it for free:
Sample pages;
Start reading it for free:
Start reading it for free:
Showing posts with label fentanyl. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fentanyl. Show all posts
Sunday, June 1, 2025
Friday, March 2, 2018
Pain, Chronic Pain, and Opioids
Pain: What is it and how do you treat it?
Chronic pain is recognized by the World Health Organization as a leading medical issue, worldwide.
Pain also has been called a first possible step on the road to opioid addiction. A slip, a broken limb followed by a prescription to oxycontin or other powerful opioid, misuse of that prescription, and the path to heroin or fentanyl abuse can easily start.
 |
| Learn about the brain. Click here. |
Pain is an unpleasant sensation and emotional experience linked to tissue damage. Its purpose is to allow the body to react and prevent further tissue damage.
We feel pain when a signal is sent through nerve fibers to the brain for interpretation.
The experience of pain is different for everyone, and there are different ways of feeling and describing pain. This can makes it difficult to define and treat.
Pain can be short-term or long-term, it can stay in one place, or it can spread around the body.
Fast facts on pain:
--Pain results from tissue damage.
--It is a part of the body's defense mechanism. --It warns us to take action to prevent further tissue damage.
--People experience and describe pain differently, and this makes it hard to diagnose.
--A range of medications and other treatments can help relieve pain, depending on the cause.
Pain chronic, acute
Pain chronic, acute
Pain can be chronic or acute and take a variety of forms and severities.
Pain is felt when special nerves that detect tissue damage send signals to transmit information about the damage along the spinal cord to the brain. These nerves are known as nociceptors.
The brain then decides what to do about the pain.
For example, if you touch a hot surface, a message will travel through a reflex arc in the spinal cord and cause an immediate contraction of the muscles. This contraction will pull your hand away from the hot surface.
This happens so fast that the message doesn't even reach the brain. However, the pain message will continue to the brain. Once there, it will cause an unpleasant sensation of pain to be felt.
How an individual's brain interprets these signals and the efficiency of the communication channel between the nociceptors and the brain dictate how people feel pain.
Source: Medical News Today
By Adam Felman
Reviewed by Deborah Weatherspoon, PhD, RN, CRNAThursday, December 21, 2017
Opioid crisis cuts U.S. life expectancy
The opioid crisis is rippling through the U.S. healthcare system, causing a spike in rates of hepatitis C related to increased opioid injections and reducing overall life expectancy among Americans, which has fallen for the second year in a row, U.S. health officials said.
 |
| Addiction is a brain disease. Learn about it in clear language. |
Heroin, an illegal opioid that is typically injected, accounted for around 15,500 deaths, and prescription painkillers were involved in about 14,500, the CDC reported.
“These are not simply numbers - these are actual lives,” said Benjamin F. Miller, chief policy officer of Well Being Trust, a non-profit foundation focused on mental health issues. “Seeing the loss of life at this dramatic rate calls for more immediate action.”
President Donald Trump in October declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency, which senior administration officials said would redirect federal resources and loosen regulations to combat abuse of the drugs. However, he stopped short of declaring a national emergency, a move he had promised months before and which would have freed up more federal money.
Overdose rates rose in 40 states and in Washington, D.C., between 2015 and 2016, with 17 states seeing increases of 25 percent or more, according to the TFAH analysis.
“Every community has been impacted by this crisis,” Auerbach said, adding that the government was not making the investments needed to “turn the tide.”
The surge in overdose deaths has depressed recent gains in U.S. life expectancy, which fell to an average age of 78.6, down 0.1 year from 2015 and marking the first two-year drop since 1962-1963.
In a separate report, the CDC linked the recent steep increases in hepatitis C infections to increases in opioid injection.
Researchers used a national database that tracks substance abuse admissions to treatment facilities in all 50 U.S. states. They found a 133 percent increase in acute hepatitis C cases that coincided with a 93 percent increase in admissions for opioid injection between 2004 to 2014.
“Hepatitis C is a deadly, common, and often invisible result of America’s opioid crisis,” said Dr. Jonathan Mermin, director of CDC’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention. Mermin urged testing people who inject drugs for hepatitis C infection to prevent new transmissions.
As the opioid epidemic has worsened, many state attorneys general have sued makers of these drugs as they investigate whether manufacturers and distributors engaged in unlawful marketing behavior.
Reuters, Inc.
Thursday, December 7, 2017
Sunday, July 16, 2017
Join our conversation on the drug epidemic and families
 | |
| The amount of drug that can kill. Fentanyl threatens to greatly worsen our addiction crisis. |
A social worker in a small upstate New York town told me that in order to shoot up with meth, teens in his town used the only private space they could find: their family car. They shot up in the most secluded place they could find--empty downtown areas, WHILE DRIVING.
A mental health worker in Vermont told me that they're on the verge of giving up on today's youth and trying to prevent children from becoming the next generation of addicts.
Former President Bill Clinton gave a speech recently saying that the opioid epidemic will destroy this country.
WHAT WE'RE DOING
A Thousand Moms, which has produced a series of books entitled "Healing the Brain," will hold a four-week conference-call series entitled "Network of Support: Addiction and Our Families."
Made possible by a donation from a concerned supporter, A Thousand Moms’ four-part information series for educators, parents, social workers, other concerned individuals is now free of charge. Dates for Network of Support: The Addiction Crisis are Tuesdays, July 18/19, July 25/26, August 1/2 and August 8/9. (Original presentations are repeated on the following day for the convenience of participants. Times: Tuesdays at 11:00 am EDT., Wednesdays at 7:00 pm EDT.
Calls last one hour. CONF CALL #: 605 475-6333 ACCESS CODE: 2456474
Presented in clear, non-complicated language
To empower participants, coverage in this series will include a basic understanding of how addiction works in the brain and body. Each session will combine addiction facts with practical strategies for coping with current or potential substance abuse by a loved one. Substance abuse topics include: How the brain works; Why is addiction a brain disease? Opioids/heroin; Methamphetamines, cocaine; and Alcohol and marijuana. Support topics include: Positive parenting as a prevention tool for drug abuse; Communication, encouragement,and negotiations; Setting limits; supervision, and knowing your child's friends.
The conference call programs are presented by Fred Elia, MS, president of A Thousand Moms, and David Balog, author, Dana Foundation’s Sourcebook of Brain Science and Healing the Brain: Stress, Trauma and Development.
First call: Tuesday, July 18, 11:00 AM EDT
CONF CALL #: 605 475-6333 ACCESS CODE: 2456474
Wednesday, May 24, 2017
Opioids, Heroin and Public Health
In this blog we will look at timely topics on the brain. Learn along with a copy from our book series, Healing the Brain. Get your copy today. A Thousand Moms offers workshops to the general public. These workshops are presented in clear, non-complicated language. In New York, Vermont and Massachusetts, please call 518 322-0607 or write to athousandmoms@yahoo.com.
Source: The Dana Foundation
The Opioid Epidemic
“We’ve moved from an epidemic to a crisis” in opioid abuse in the United States, said Daniel Ciccarone, M.D., MPH, during a panel discussion at AAAS in Washington, DC, this week. Ciccarone, a doctor at University of California, San Francisco, who treats addicted people and does research, described a pattern of intertwined waves involving abuse of prescription pills, heroin, and synthetic opioids like fentanyl.For example, while overdose deaths due to prescription pill use are spread relatively evenly across the country, “this is not true for heroin,” Ciccarone said. The Northeast has had troubles with opioid abuse for a generation, while in the Midwest, numbers have jumped just recently. And while older folks (50-64) are using pills in greater numbers, it’s younger people (20-35) driving heroin use.
“Heroin itself is becoming more and more dangerous,” he said, especially when it is laced with synthetic drugs like fentanyl and carfentanil (used to tranquilize elephants). People who stop breathing after using these stronger concoctions often don’t respond to emergency treatments like naloxone.
The latest epidemic came about in large part out of doctors’ good intentions, said Nora Volkow, M.D., director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of NIH. Starting in the late 1990s, doctors increasingly prescribed opioids to young and old for acute (sudden onset) and chronic pain (pain that is regular and has lasted for months). They were responding to a call to better help people who were in severe pain, and they thought that while the patient was experiencing pain, they would not be likely to become addicted to the drug.
“The epidemic really started from our over-prescription,” said Volkow, a member of the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives. For example, in 2013, the number of total pills prescribed in this country was the equivalent of a 1 month supply for every adult in the US, she said. Over the past 15 years, “the whole United States appeared to become infected,” she said.
Opioids are very effective for acute pain. Volkow described her own experience taking them after she was in a car accident: “It was amazing, not just because the pain was gone but because of that great sense of well-being.” But many people grow more tolerant of the drug the longer they use it, and need ever-increasing doses to find relief. This can lead to over-use, and to people transitioning from pills to black-market drugs like heroin and fentanyl. “80 percent of new cases of heroin are actually emerging from individuals who became addicted to prescription opioids,” she said; because prescription drugs are expensive and difficult to get, while heroin has gotten cheaper, they make the switch. (The other 20 percent of new users are mainly younger people, who started directly with heroin as a recreational drug.)
This is dire news, but we have experienced waves of other deadly maladies and overcome them before. “When we had the HIV epidemic, when we had the Ebola epidemic, we addressed it using science,” Volkow said. “Scientific solutions can provide us means to control these problems, and it’s not any different for the opioid crisis”
Map of opioid prescriptions and overdoses. Data source: National Vital Statistics, 2013 Source: State of Maryland
The VA is applying a series of evidence-based actions to reduce prescriptions, including more-closely monitoring people who are taking opioids, advising doctors not to prescribe opioids for chronic pain, and suggesting alternative drugs and counseling.
Volkow described three areas NIH and others are working on: developing better, safer treatments for chronic pain; designing better strategies to help addicted people come off the drugs; and finding more direct opioid-blocking drug interventions like methadone, naloxone, and buprenorphine. The latter are proven to help, but “they are not being used. Less than 15 percent of people who would benefit from these are getting them,” she said, because of stigma, lack of doctor training, and lack of insurance reimbursement. In addition, “with science, of course we look for transformation,” she said, including looking for a potential vaccine against fentanyl.
Drexler described several current models of treatment that have evidence of success, including brief one-on-one counseling, which “is sufficient for many with opioid-use disorder,” she said. Other methods include the Massachusetts model of buprenorphine maintenance, Project Echo in New Mexico, and a method mirroring the alcohol care management model.
“I’m very hopeful that we’ll be able to disseminate these models out,” she said, perhaps by using marketing methods similar to those drug companies use. Still, “we need more help for newer, better treatments as well as how to implement the ones we have.”
“We need to treat this as a poisoning epidemic, not a drug epidemic,” Ciccarone said, including boosting programs that do “harm reduction,” caring for people who are engaging in risky behavior. “We tend to think of harm reduction as ‘aiding and abetting drug users,’ in the political sphere, but harm reduction saves lives,” it’s cost-effective, and it can bring people into treatment, he said. “Stop treating the drugs as sort of the special privilege of the criminal justice folks and the injured bodies as only public health.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)