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healing ways
“Mindfulness meditation is about
discipline and regulating one’s attention. It appears to shut down the thalamus, the brain’s gatekeeper, and the brain’s ability to register pain,” explains Zeidan.
Yoga: Strongly positive effects have been reported in several studies, including one on 150 veterans with chronic low back pain from the Veterans Administration San Diego Healthcare System. It showed that 12 weeks of yoga classes reduced pain and opioid use, and improved functionality of participants; many of them had suffered back pain for more than 15 years.
THAN OPIOIDS Natural Ways to Reduce Pain by Kathleen Barnes
BETTER OPTIONS C
hronic pain affects 100 million Americans, with annual treatment costs reaching $635 billion,
according to the Institute of Medicine. Worse, opiate-derived pain medications, conventional medicine’s go-to treatment for chronic pain, are addictive and deadly. Te Annals of Internal Medicine reports that an estimated 2 million Americans suffered from opioid use disorder involving prescription drugs as of 2016 while 12 million admitted to misusing them. Legal and illegal opioids killed 64,070 Americans in 2016, 21 percent more than the previous year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some opioid addiction stems from
use of illegal recreational drugs like heroin and cocaine, but the National Institute of Drug Abuse testified to the U.S. Senate that as of 2014 more than four times as many Americans were addicted to prescription opioids (2.1 million) than heroin (467,000).
18 Central Florida Natural approaches, less
harmful in relieving pain and thereby preventing drug addictions, are addressing and ameliorating long-term back or neck, nerve and even cancer pain, and saving lives. Te first step in preventing
dependency is to avoid opioids completely, says Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurobiology and anatomy at the Wake Forest School of Medicine, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina: “Opioids don’t work for chronic pain. Tey may be effective for acute pain, such as right aſter an injury or surgery, but they are ineffective and addictive in the long run.” Here are several better ways to feel better.
Mindfulness meditation: Zeidan recommends mindfulness meditation and cites a University of Massachusetts study of people with chronic pain in which pain lessened by at least 65 percent aſter 10 weeks of this practice.
Acupuncture: Te ancient Chinese modality that’s been used to treat all types of pain for millennia has become such a mainstream treatment that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recommends that healthcare providers learn more about it to help patients avoid prescription opioids. “All pain starts with imbalance,”
says Terri Evans, a doctor of Oriental medicine in Naples, Florida. “Acupuncture is about creating balance in the body and in releasing the fascia, where pain patterns get locked.”
Marijuana: All forms of marijuana, or cannabis, are illegal on the federal level, but medical marijuana is now legal in 29 states and the District of Columbia. In a study from San Francisco General Hospital published in the journal Neurology, researchers found that smoking the first cannabis cigarette reduced pain by 72 percent in a group of patients with painful neuropathy. Te body’s endocannabinoid system, found in the brain, organs, connective tissues and immune cells, is one of its natural pain-coping mechanisms, and is most affected by cannabis. Mitch Earleywine, Ph.D., associate
professor of clinical psychology at the State University of New York at Albany, author of Understanding Marijuana: A New Look at the Scientific Evidence and
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