Chronic pain affects 100 million Americans – that’s more than the number impacted by diabetes, heart disease and cancer combined. Most suffering from pain turn to their family physician for help, but many leave the office with nothing more than a prescription for painkillers in hand. Many physicians simply do not know how to help their patients manage, or eliminate, chronic pain, and this trend is going to continue for the foreseeable future unless a radical change occurs. They resort to the only treatment they know: prescription drugs. And now we’re facing another epidemic on top of chronic pain: prescription drug abuse.
Prescription drug abuse the fastest-growing drug problem in the US according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as the number of deaths from opioid painkillers like hydrocodone and oxycodone rose nearly four-fold between 1999 and 2009.
The overdoses now kill more people than cocaine and heroin combined.