Posted on

Embracing Physical Pain

Have you ever thought your chronic pain can only be relieved by taking ever-increasing chronic pain meds? Yeah, me, too. But, in this second of a series of posts on dealing with your life’s pains, I’ll tell you what I found out. If you will apply the P10 Principle to relate with your pain, instead of just using drugs to avoid it, then you can manage your pain with a lot less pain medication, a lot less harmful and/or addictive pain medication, or may be no pain medication at all.

Pain has three components; Suffering from pain ignores them; Relating with pain embraces them.

Each and all of what we call physical, mental, or emotional pain are comprised of each and all three physiological, psychological, and emotional components when it comes to perception of and response to a pain stimulus. The physiology of pain is the signal transmitted from stem to stern and around about through the central nervous system that “something is wrong and we need to do something about it.” The psychology of pain is the interpretation or meaning we give to that pain signal. And that interpretation of pain is created, viewed, and perceived through the often abraded and/or opaqued lenses of our emotions.

Suffering, if one choose’s to allow it, results from ignoring or, worse, denying one or more of the physiological, mental, and emotional components of pain and negatively and reactively responding to one’s pain instead of positively and proactively relating with one’s pain.  Relating with both temporary and chronic pain involves understanding all of such pain’s three components and differentiating between the actual pain and the suffering it causes, and focuses on achieving relief from that suffering.

Suffering from pain flows from thoughts such as: “Why is this happening to me?!” “This isn’t fair!” “It’s horrible!” “I can’t stand it!”

Relating with pain flows from thoughts such as: “Why is this happening in me?” “This is a physiologic process.” “I can physically, mentally, and emotionally work with this.” “I CAN handle this!”

Using the P10 Principle can move you from suffering from pain to dealing with it.

Proactively want to reduce your pain using better resources than medications.

Perceive your practically perfect performance of dealing with your pain; your present quite imperfect way of dealing with it; and your life’s precious resources of self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people that you can use to deal better with it.

Plan how you can use your life’s precious resources to deal affirmatively with your pain as best as you can.

Prepare your resources.

Practice your plan.

Persist by continuously monitoring the quality of both your practice and your results, and improving your planning, preparation, and practice.

Promote your Practically Perfect Performance as much as you feasibly can.

In the next post of this series, I will discuss in more detail how to apply the P10 Principle to specific examples of pain.

In the meantime, Go Out There Today And Be Great! All The Time!

Posted on

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly About Medical Marijuana

Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia have legalized using marijuana. The federal government still maintains medical marijuana is illegal, but the Attorney General has decided not to prosecute registered doctors, patients, growers, and dispensers who are complying with their states laws. Still, many doctors, including me, do not like prescribing medical marijuana. Here’s some of the good, the bad, and the ugly about medical marijuana.

Like almost everything else in life and medicine, medical marijuana has its good parts and bad parts. Marijuana contains 60 different cannabinoids, some of which have psychoactive effects by interacting with cannabinoid receptors in your brain, spinal cord, and lymph tissue. Marijuana contains a lot of other substances that can hurt you.

A medical marijuana patient can ingest marijuana’s cannabinoids by inhaling aerosolized THC-containing liquids, smoking weed, eating THC-containing food, or orally taking cannabinoid extract.

There are two FDA-approved cannbinoid’s currently available in the United States for nausea and vomiting that results from chemotherapy and a third one that is used for muscle wasting accompanying AIDS and spasticity due to spinal cord injury. Chronic pain accompanying cancer and rheumatoid arthritis respond to marijuana use. Newer THC-containing drugs are being clinically tested to help with multiple sclerosis and neuropathic and cancer-related pain.

While they have been found to help some types of medical issues, as far as chronic pain is concerned, THC has not been found to be any more effective than diphenhydramine (Benadryl), codeine, or amitriptyline (Elavil). THC has not been proven effective for acute pain, glaucoma, Parkinson’s disease, tremor and many other diseases whom which patients suffer.

Marijuana will, no doubt, be found to help more medical illnesses as time marches on. Nonetheless, cannabinoids are not a magical silver bullet.

 

Both doctors and patients alike know the bad side-effects of marijuana. 9% of experimental users become addicted, especially in adolesence. Adolescents using marijuana may have larger dips in their IQs and may drop out of high school and college more than older users. Using marijuana during pregnancy has some negative effects on children later in life.

Even though marijuana smoke does not include nicotine, it does contain harmful toxins and may injure larger airways and result in chronic bronchitis. So, just like you should never smoke tobacco cigarettes, you should never smoke marijuana cigarettes either. In other words, “If you have to take that weed, take it orally.”

Doctors cannot prescribe marijuana for patients, but they can certify :

  • the patient has a medical condition that can, to a medical probability, be helped with marijuana;
  • the patient has not responded to other therapies;
  • the patient has had a comprehensive assessment and a long talk about the risks and benefits of medical marijuana;
  • the patient knows medical marijuana is not endorsed by many major medical organization;
  • the patient does not suffer from substance abuse, psychosis, unstable mood disorder; and
  • the patient lives in a state that allows the use of medical marijuana.

Many primary care physicians are declining to certify medical marijuana for patients who may in fact respond to it. The reasons include an aversion to beginning along the slippery slope of becoming pain management physicians. I, for one, choose to let the pain management consultants to whom I refer my patients handle all aspects of those patients’ pain management issue, including both marijuana or any other useful medication their pain-management specialists deem appropriate.