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Avoid Addiction Through Medication Management

When you’re in pain, your only thought is of relief — and this is perfectly understandable. In fact, more than 20% of Americans struggle with pain on a daily basis, and of this number, 8% deal with high-impact pain. Unfortunately, any road to relief that involves narcotics is a bumpy one that can veer off into addiction all too easily. 

Through medication management, you can get the relief you need while avoiding this slippery slope of medication misuse and subsequent addiction problems. And “problem” may be too small a word for the agony that comes with addiction.

At Comprehensive Pain Management, Drs. Do Chan and Boris Shwartzman and our team work with patients to restore quality of life, mobility, and independence through a variety of pain management services, including prescription medications. But we don’t take these medications lightly, and we put controls in place to help you find relief from your pain while preventing the very serious potential of addiction.

Here’s a look at how we can help you avoid addiction through comprehensive medication management.

Addiction: A clear and present danger

We’re going to start with an eye-opening statistic — every day 130 people die of an opioid overdose in the United States. Furthermore, 8-12% of those who are addicted to opioids first misused prescription medications, and 80% of those who use heroin first started with doctor-prescribed opioids.

While scare tactics aren’t a terribly great way to start a conversation, we want to underscore just how dangerous opioids can be in terms of their addictive properties. 

Opioids are highly effective at their intended use — to stifle your pain — and they do this by attaching themselves to natural opioid receptors in your brain to block the pain signaling. As your brain becomes accustomed to these medications, however, new neural pathways form and you find yourself needing more of the drug in order to achieve the same effect. In the full throes of addiction, your brain has been rewired, and it produces uncontrollable cravings for the drug that even the most strong-willed among us can’t ignore. 

Our goal is to prevent this from happening through medication management.

Managing your meds

Let us start by saying we understand that sometimes medications are a crucial piece to solving your pain puzzle, and we’re not suggesting that we eliminate them entirely. Quite the contrary, we tackle your pain from every angle in order to restore you to an active and happy life, and one of those angles may involve pain medications.

Our goal is to provide you with this effective relief while safeguarding you from addiction. To do this, our medication management program adheres to the latest guidelines set forth by the Department of Health in terms of dosing and monitoring.

After a comprehensive evaluation of your health, your medical history, and your behavioral health, we decide whether you’re a good candidate for our medication management program. Should we move forward, you need to do your part by following dosing instructions, and we also have controls in place to ensure this, such as regular urine testing and behavioral assessments.

We also espouse other treatment protocols in conjunction with your medications to provide you with the tools you need to gain the upper hand on your pain. By treating your pain symptomatically, and at its source, we can get you back to a better quality of life.

If you’d like to learn more about our medication management program, please contact one of our offices in Attleboro or Franklin, Massachusetts, or South Kingstown or Warwick, Rhode Island.

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