Opioids are substances used to treat moderate to severe pain that act on opioid receptors to generate morphine-like effects. These receptors are present in the brain, in the spinal cord, on peripheral neurons, and digestive tract. Opioids painkillers help to manage chronic pain. But recent research has found that the highly addictive drug is leading to growing numbers of deaths due to its high rate of addiction and overdose misuse.
Doctors thus recommend non-drug approaches to chronic pain management. Naturopathic medicine works as an effective alternative to opioids. It is an old science medicine that is safe and features a holistic approach and natural treatments. Licensed naturopathic doctors know the advantages of natural treatments and the deadly effects of opioid painkillers. Thus, they prefer to use opioid painkillers as a last resort.
National Crisis: Research Report on Opioid Painkillers
In the United States in 2015, more than 52,000 deaths occurred due to drug overdose. Around 20,000 people accounted for prescriptions of opioid painkillers such as oxycodone, hydrocodone, codeine, morphine, and fentanyl. Another report stated that out of 20.5 million Americans, 2 million involved prescription opioids. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that $78.5 billion a year is the total economic burden of prescription opioid misuse alone in the United States.
How did this happen?
As per the National Institute on Drug Abuse report, pharmaceutical companies in the late 1990s convinced health care providers that people will not get addicted to the use of opioids. As a result, physicians began prescribing opioids in large numbers to gain profit leading to widespread misuse. As per the counts, 21- 29% of people misused, 8 -12% developed an opioid use disorder.
Apart from Opioids, aspirin and ibuprofen are some of the additional dangerous pain management drugs that have adverse health effects, involving risk of heart attack and stroke, acute kidney failure, anemia, hypertension, and miscarriage.
Naturopathic Doctors: Role in the Opioid Wars
To resolve America’s opioid problem, naturopathic doctors and other medical professionals from other disciplines have actively engaged themselves to develop better pain management practices and modify national prescribing habits to limit the overuse of opioids.
These plans take into account the naturopathy treatments under which the doctors look into the root causes of each person’s pain and go through each individual’s lifestyle, nutrition, current, and past stressors. Accordingly, patients are advised to exercise various combinations of dietary tips and nutritional supplements along with botanical medicines to help reduce inflammation and the pain it causes. Additional activities like exercise, physical rehabilitation, and mind-body approaches are also recommended.
Naturopathic medicine was practiced on a group of people and the results were positive. Naturopathic therapies reduced pain by over 54%, also diminished disabilities, and boosted the self-healing capacities of the human body which was significantly better than other approaches used in the trial.
Naturopathic doctors recognize the importance of pharmaceuticals and are ready to work closely with medical providers. The doctors agreed to make appropriate referrals for further diagnosis, treatment support, or surgical intervention as indicated with other conventional pharmaceutical companies.
Naturopathic doctors have successfully filled in an important gap in the medical treatment of chronic pain.
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