subject: St. Louis Park chiropractor challenges pain drugs [print this page] St. Louis Park chiropractor challenges pain drugs
Where is the magic bullet for pain that we were promised?
Hi, this is Dr. Harlan Mittag. I am a chiropractor, nutritionist and acupuncturist who for the past 25 years has been helping my patients get pain relief naturally.
One thing that I find that most people do not understand is that there is not a magic pill or a single silver bullet that is going to do it, do the miracle and get rid of all your pain permanently.
Getting pain relief naturally is usually more complicated than getting relief from one pill. If you look at what is happening in the realm of pills, it is not very good.
We as a nation consume about a ton of pain killers each year or about $10 billion dollars worththat is about $37 per person each year. The trouble is that there is a huge downside to these pain drugs, one that we do not hear enough about.
Stanford University (my alma mater) attributed 107,000 hospitalizations and over 16,500 deaths to non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs in a single year. Another study found that if you take over the counter NSAIDS (pain killers) you are six times more likely to end up in the hospital with gastrointestinal problems than someone who doesn't.
Remember the fanfare about the COX-2 anti-inflammatory drugs like Vioxx and Celebrex that were touted as being the new miracle drugs? Well less than ten years later many of them have been pulled off of the market because of their life threatening side effects.
So truly, we have to get over this notion that we are going to be able to take a single pill and somehow get our body to heal an injury that has been causing pain and bothering us for weeks, months or even years.
The February 2009 Time Magazine featured an article on chronic pain treatment in the United States and came out and blamed our medical system for relying too much on drugs to alleviate chronic pain. It even said that the doctors are largely at fault. Here are two quotes from the article:
The reason for the widespread failure to find adequate relief is that most of us seek it entirely in a pill bottle.
The quest for pharmaceutical salvation is misguided to begin with.
So we really have to get it through our heads that we really cannot rely on a pill bottle. I realized this the hard way. A couple years ago I herniated a disc in my low back after doing a lot of lifting one weekend. I ended up in an emergency room I was in such pain, and then on my back on oxycodone
After five days on my back on the oxycodone it occurred to me that I was not even using my own natural treatments for pain. I started immediately treating my low back with natural treatments and in four days was back to work half-time, and off of all the pain drugs. In a week I was working full time, off of all pain drugs and feeling no pain.
So results are possible, but you have to use more that one treatment modality, more than a single pill. If you want to learn more, please consider taking a look at my free ebook Docs Guide To Natural Pain Relief which you can download for free at
