Pain Medications and Addiction

Whenever I have had contact with the medical profession in the treatment of addicts outside the field of recovery, the prescribing of powerful narcotic pain-relievers, sleeping pills and muscle-relaxants is still the knee-jerk reflex of first resort. Sadly, this is true regardless of all the advances in the field of addictive brain chemistry in the past five, count ‘em… that is FIVE…, decades. The profession is profoundly and, often times, ignorant or, perhaps, corrupted by greed to stay in the dark about the damage done in feeding the disease. The concept of alcoholism as a disease of the mind was well known when Bill W. wrote this article in 1958 [*]. Change comes slowly when attitudes and convictions are so entrenched.

 *As Bill Sees It-180-Community Problem

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 Pain management has long been touted as one of the many holistic health benefits of meditation, but now there’s new research that tells us even novices can dramatically reduce pain and pain-related brain activation after just an hour of meditation training.

Researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center used a special type of brain imaging to record the brain activity of a small group of healthy medical student volunteers who had attended four 20-minute training sessions on “mindfulness meditation” — a technique focused on acknowledging and letting go of distraction, which reduces the stress response.
The volunteers were then subjected to pain via a small thermal stimulator (heated to 120 degrees), which was applied to the back of each volunteer’s right calf. The students reported on the intensity and unpleasantness of the pain.

After going through the meditation training, the volunteers reported a 40 percent decrease in pain intensity and a 57 percent reduction in pain unpleasantness.

But perhaps even more interesting were the changes in brain activity.