Dr. David Koivuranta explains why opioids fail most people: they treat symptoms, not underlying pain, leading to tolerance and escalating doses. About 30,000 Americans die from opioids yearly, and many who abuse them started with legitimate prescriptions. He advocates chiropractic care and other drug-free approaches as safer first-line treatments.
Chapters
Hey everyone, it's Dr. Dave. What kind of crazy experiences are you up to today? How are you out there having fun and enjoying life? I hope you're having a good time making those memories. And, you know, having said that statement, it's great when we can, but there are unfortunately a lot of people who can't. And one of the biggest things that detracts from our ability to have these great experiences every day is pain. And pain affects everybody. From moms and dads to youth to seniors, all kinds of occupations, people end up having pain problems because physically, chemically, and emotionally, uh, life throws us some challenges sometimes. And not just any one challenge, but usually multiple challenges over time. And sometimes we end up with a macro problem, it happens in a big instant, or it's micro problem that builds up over time repeatedly and we end up falling behind on our health a little bit. And Because nobody likes to be in pain, and I don't blame them, I don't like to be in pain myself, we quite often turn to solutions that help get us out of pain quickly. And quite often when we seek out that pain relief, we turn to medications, whether over-the-counter or prescription. And that's legitimate. Sometimes there's a place and a need for these medications, like opioids, that are very powerful at helping us work through some pain. The challenge with opioids is it quite often doesn't deal with the cause or source of our health problem. Our body is very good, because it is a foreign substance, at eliminating it from our body, and it does it faster and faster. So quite often our need for those medications increases to help deal with the same amount of pain. The challenge with that is sometimes there are some nasty side effects. In fact, every year in the United States alone, 30,000 people die from side effects from that opioid use. 3 out of 5 people who end up illegally abusing opioids actually come from normal people, day to day living their lives, who end up with a pain problem and have used a prescription to help, but unfortunately never resolve the problem and end up using them long term. And death is just one of the worst side effects. There are so many others that cause a downward spiral in a person's health from using those medications. So this is nothing new. This is something that's very well documented. It's been in the news. It's been in the research. But the tragedy really is that the opioid use should be a last resort or a short-term resort. And really there should be a focus on more conservative options to help that person with their health problem, especially their pain problem, so that it doesn't become a chronic health problem and an increased risk to their health over the years. So chiropractic care, being the third largest healthcare profession in the world, the largest drug-free, surgery-free healthcare profession in the world, not only focuses on helping people get relief, but by improving and recovering function so they can maintain that relief. And that if they need any medications, they're going to be a last resort or a short-term resort. But chiropractic is not the only one. Massage therapy, naturopathy, traditional Chinese medicine— there are a lot of different approaches that can help people with their pain so that they don't have to resort to these dangerous options that are very effective and sometimes quite necessary, but we don't want to become dependent on them, and we don't want to be fooled into thinking they're actually dealing with the cause or source of the problem. So if you're one of these people who are unfortunate enough to have had some buildup in your life, or now you're dealing with some pain state, or if you know someone who's dealing with pain, whether it's new or long-term, you want to encourage them to seek out some of these conservative options like chiropractic care. So that they don't end up on a path that's going to be detrimental to their health in the long term. And as I talk about all the time, creating these good experiences in life, even when someone takes that medication, their experience in life just isn't the same because their body is not able to experience the world the same way when it's altered through a drug. So if we want to have those great experiences, we want to seek out these conservative options. So go out there, help your friends, help your family, help yourself, make sure they're making good choices. So that we can all have these great experiences together.
