Investigating alternatives to narcotics in the treatment of chronic pain

     CBS News recently did a report on veterans struggling with chronic pain and the increased overprescribing of medications to combat soldier’s suffering – both mental and physical.

     Reporter Jim Axelrod told the story of John Renschle, a thirty-year-old retired Army Infantryman.  Injured by a mortar blast in Iraq, he needs a cane and has trouble even holding his child. The VA has him on 13 different medications for his pain; and he feels hopeless about his future.  Renschler commented, “And when I cry out to the VA, my own source of medical care, to help me with this situation, and I’m hit with a brick wall and a bottle of pills, that does not end the hopelessness.”

     Army Spc. Scott MacDonald suffered with chronic back pain after five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.  VA doctors prescribed eight pain and psychiatric medications.  “It just got out of control,” stated his wife Heather. “They just started pill after pill, prescription after prescription.”  After a ninth pill was added, McDonald died. According to CBS, “The coroner’s report ruled his death accidental.  He had been ‘overmedicated’ and that he died from the combined effects of five of his medications”.  

     CBS News obtained VA data which showed that, while the number of patients treated by the VA is up 29 percent, narcotic prescriptions are up 259 percent.  “There’s an overuse of narcotics,” stated Dr. Phyllis Hollenbeck, a physician at the VA medical center in Jackson, Mississippi.  “It’s the first reflex for pain”, she continued.     

     You don’t have to have been in the military to suffer from chronic pain.  According to Dr. Dominic Costabile, of Lisle, “Neurogenic pain is a debilitating pain, which lasts and lasts, months upon months.  It is the ‘I can’t walk, can’t sleep, can’t work or enjoy life’ kind of pain.”  Costabile stated, “Narcotics are never the answer because they have side effects.  All they do is suppress pain at the cerebral cortex – they must be taken over and over because they do not complete the healing process.  They just don’t work effectively,” he noted during a recent interview.

     A former board-certified family specialist, Costabile now practices regenerative injection therapy formerly known as prolotherapy – a non-pharmacological method of treating pain which involves injecting a solution into the body, generally in the region of tendons or ligaments.

        Finding ways to alleviate chronic pain outside the realm of addictive narcotics is of great concern to patients, physicians, researchers and public health workers. Researchers are examining increasing evidence of the pain-ending efficacy of many alternative treatments. Solutions range from new ways to treat the body to approaches that focus on the mental sources of pain and include exploring even the effectiveness of forgiveness, love and prayer.

     Costabile shared with me the story of one patient.  She wrote, “For three years my life was turned upside down, the nerves on the right side of the face had been injured from a dental procedure.  The day this happened to me and all the days following I was in severe pain and a prison of pain meds.

     She went to the Mayo Clinic, where she was told they could not help her.  She heard of Dr. Costabile and regenerative injection therapy. He asked her not to take any pain medication before her appointment.  After the superficial perineural injection, she felt so much better.  “I went home actually feeling like a different person.  Actually not a different person but feeling like me, feeling like the person I was three years ago.  I was so unbelievably excited,” she wrote.  Costabile says the results have continued.

     Among physicians who have moved outside of mainline allopathic medicine and are researching the relationship that thinking and spirituality have on health, Dr. Larry Dossey has written of the healing power of the emotions – especially love.  Dossey wrote, “The power of love to change bodies is legendary, built into folklore, common sense, and everyday experience….Throughout history, ‘tender loving care’ has uniformly been recognized as a valuable element in healing.” (blog.gaiam.com).

     A century before Dossey researched and began to write and speak about the transforming power of human love, Mary Baker Eddy researched, spoke and wrote about the transforming power of prayer and divine Love.  After suffering from chronic pain for many years, Eddy’s invalidism turned her to search out many types of medical and nonmedical avenues for relief.  She finally found not just relief, but complete healing through prayer that acknowledges the power of thought aligned with the Divine.  Later she wrote, “…I know that prayer brings the seeker into closer proximity with divine Love. And thus he finds what he seeks, the power of God to heal and to save.”

     For sufferers of chronic pain who have not found relief or, worse, have found addiction and other side effects to drug-based therapies, there are solutions. It may take a little researching and looking outside the box of conventional thinking.  Costabile told me, “We are all prisoners of our education and our mind.  That’s why it is important to keep an open mind.  There are so many avenues of learning.”

     He continued, “Sometimes it is hard to keep up, there are so many advances – there is a rapid pace of advances today.  There are so many brilliant individuals who have knocked me out of my own prison of thought and shared with me marvelous ideas and effective treatments.”   The exploration of new ideas and new treatments holds hope for those struggling with crippling pain.

Thomas Mitchinson is a self-syndicated columnist writing on the relationship between thought, spirituality and health, and trends in that field.  He is also the media spokesman for Christian Science in Illinois.  You can contact him at illinois@compub.org.