By Bob Livingston
I have a friend who suffers from migraines. The young lady of whom I speak has suffered from this condition for most of her life. They are often debilitating. For years, she sought answers from conventional medicine, until she got some unusual advice in an emergency room.
My friend visited her local emergency room twice in the space of five days for two separate migraines. On the first visit she was given a shot, often referred to as the “magic shot,” which consisted of Phenergan and “enough Demerol to bring down a bull elephant” — the words of the on-call physician. The shot made her fall asleep for about three hours, after which she awoke and suffered for an additional 26 hours before the migraine abated. All told, that migraine lasted for 72 hours.
On the second visit, she was attended by a nurse practitioner (NP). This man, she told me, was different. After she explained her current symptoms and related her experience during the first visit, the NP closed the door to her room.
“Do you want to have the shot,” he asked, “or do you want to get better?”
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Taken aback, my friend replied that she wanted a treatment that worked. The Nurse Practicioner then explained that, in the fast-paced world of emergency rooms, most medical professionals assume the people who come in complaining of migraines just want the “magic shot.”
“If they’re drug seeking, it’s faster to just give them the drugs,” he explained. “I never prescribe opioids for real migraines.”
In all the years my friend had been visiting emergency rooms, she had always received a shot. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. Never, not once, had she been told that she was being treated like a mere drug addict.
It turns out, Demerol (chemical name meperidine) does not cure migraines, and hospitals know this.
“Despite guidelines recommending against opioids as first line treatment for acute migraine, meperidine is the agent used most commonly in North American emergency departments,” read a study reported in Annals of Emergency Medicine, a peer-reviewed medical journal.
The study concluded that: “Meperidine is less efficacious and associated with more side effects than DHE regimens in acute migraine headache. There was also a trend toward decreased efficacy of meperidine compared to anti-emetics… Clinicians should consider alternatives to meperidine when treating acute migraine with injectable agents.”
The NP instead prescribed for my friend what he called “the migraine cocktail” — Benadryl, Compazine and Toradol, given intravenously with a liter of fluids. This remedy contained no narcotics and was relatively mild as far as prescription drugs go (although prescription drugs should be avoided, of course). Because this treatment takes an hour to administer, emergency rooms rarely offer it, choosing to just give migraine sufferers the shot.
My friend’s migraine was gone within a half-hour of being treated with the “migraine cocktail,” but when she spoke to me, she felt sick — over the way she had been treated by the medical community through the years.
Addiction epidemic
Look at your watch. Between this moment and the same time tomorrow, more than 90 Americans will die of opioid overdose.
The mainstream media would like you to believe that there’s a gun rampage every minute in the U.S. But actual statistics show that more people die in the U.S. from overdose than from car accidents and guns. Drug overdose has become the leading cause of death of Americans under 50, with two-thirds of those deaths from opioids.
This opioid epidemic has been fed by Big Pharma and the medical profession as much or more as by any stereotypical street thug peddling illicit drugs. No, Big Pharma peddles them legally, straight to your veins with a “magic shot” that does nothing for your health complaint, or straight to your “medicine” cabinet.
President Trump formally designated the opioid epidemic as a national emergency to activate official federal action on the problem. “The opioid crisis is an emergency, and I’m saying officially right now it is an emergency. It’s a national emergency. We’re going to spend a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of money on the opioid crisis,” Mr. Trump said. “It is a serious problem the likes of which we have never had.”
Opioid and opium
Opioids are a broad class of extremely strong narcotic painkillers derived from opium or synthesized to mimic the effects of opium. They include drugs like oxycodone (commonly known as OxyContin and Percocet), dilaudid, hydrocodone (Vicodin), fentanyl, morphine and heroin.
Opioids are supposed to minimize or eliminate pain and give the user a sense of well-being, and give one a kind of high. But they have a sedative effect on the part of the brain that regulates breathing. Too high a dose can cause respiratory depression resulting in respiratory failure and death.
Addiction causes “hundreds of changes” in brain chemistry and “remaps the brain,” according to a National Geographic report by author Fran Smith.
Overdoses can occur because the human body builds up tolerance for the drugs over time, requiring more and more to get the same effect. When one pill doesn’t do as well as it did, people take two pills, then three, then more, potentially leading to overdose and possible death.
The root of the problem stems from the aggressive marketing of opioids by pharmaceutical companies beginning in the 1990s and aggravated by doctors overprescribing the drugs. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the amount of prescription opioids sold to pharmacies, hospitals, and doctors’ offices nearly quadrupled from 1999 to 2010, yet there had not been an overall change in the amount of pain that Americans reported.
Young people are vulnerable, too. The journal Pediatrics reports that most teenagers who abuse opioid drugs first got the pills from a doctor.
Although prescription opioid deaths have leveled off since 2011, death from fentanyl and heroin are rising at an alarming pace. In some states where the problem is acute, like Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, fentanyl now accounts for more than half of overdose fatalities.
Fentanyl is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine and 30 to 50 times more potent than heroin. 2mg of dilaudid, a powerful opioid, will make you woozy. 2mg of fentanyl is fatal.
About 80 percent of all the world’s prescription opioids are used in the U.S., says the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “America is awash in opioids; urgent action is critical,” warned former CDC director Thomas Frieden.
But what kind of “urgent action” is not so easy to define. Libertarians make the point that we as individuals must take responsibility for our own actions and cannot blame it all on the doctors, Big Pharma and street drug pushers. It’s our obligation to know what we’re putting into our bodies and the possible risks as well as the rewards.
Then you’ve got the other side, mainstream medicine, which assumes that to “cure” ailments, one needs “treatment” and drugs. Addiction psychiatrist Dr. Laurence Westreich, an associate professor at New York University, says “It’s silly to say opioids are evil. Pain needs to be treated,” he told CBS News. Of course he did. This is what he was taught.
Pain relief without opioids
Maia Szalavitz, author of “Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction,” describes telltale clues that indicate opioid addiction: “pinpoint pupils, sleepiness, ‘nodding’ and scratching…constant money problems, arrests, track marks and infections from needle use, lying about drug use, irritability, and, when drugs can’t be obtained, physical withdrawal symptoms such as shaking, dilated pupils, nausea, diarrhea and vomiting.”
If you have any suspicion that you or anyone in your family may be slipping into opioid addiction, do something about it. Twelve-step programs like Narcotics Anonymous can be helpful. Spiritual reflection and guidance is useful.
Also, if you’re in pain and you want an alternative to narcotic drugs, the very first thing to do is watch your diet. Eliminate processed foods and foods containing high fructose corn syrup and chemical additives. These cause inflammation and can turn what would be mild pain into debilitating pain.
I have never had back pain, but many people do. Dr. Frank Shallenberger has pioneered a treatment called Prolozone. It’s a homeopathic/oxygen-ozone injection technique that was being used to treat all forms of musculo-skeletal and joint pain.
I was skeptical. But the proof is in the pudding, as they say. Shallenberger claims that about 75 percent of his back pain patients are completely pain-free. And the other 25 percent see substantial improvement.
The therapy uses medical grade ozone (03) that stimulates the healing process. There have been studies where cortisone or steroid injections have been compared to Prolozone. After six months only 15 percent of the Prolozone group were still in pain, whereas 22.5 percent of those receiving steroid injections were still in pain. Patients with disc disease did even better with only 8.6 percent still in pain versus 21.4 percent of those receiving steroid injections.
Note that only one treatment in this study was done because the repetitive use of steroids is dangerous, but not so with Prolozone.
Shallenberger also uses a pre-injection of a special mixture of vitamins, minerals and homeopathics before he injects the ozone, which he thinks dramatically improves the results. Prolozone is simple, natural, inexpensive, safe and completely free of side effects
