Chronic Pain conditions are a growing problem in the United States. And while the debate still rages about whether or not chronic pain should be managed as a separate condition or just a symptom of another problem it is clear that pain management has become a booming segment of the healthcare industry.
Consequently, the use of pharmaceutical drugs for pain control has also reached an all time high. Drugs like Oxicontin, Vicodin and methadone, are front page news in causing America’s latest drug crisis, as a result, the use of cocaine and heroin have also reached levels not seen in this country in 30 years.
Due to the economic and scientific phenomena of the pharmaceutical revolution of the 20th century, thousands of years of knowledge were suddenly abandoned. Herbal medicine has safely and effectively treated pain for millennia, and is for safer than the synthesized, processed medications that today’s doctors seem to be all too willing to hand out like so much candy.
In the realm of alternative medicine, there are many forms of natural pain management that are in fact, the basis of where many of our oh-so-popular pharmaceutical drugs come from.
Codeine and morphine are opium derivatives that may be effective but are also highly addictive, and even aspirin is a derivative of willow bark. Many other plants have been used in natural pain management since antiquity, such as lavender and chamomile for minor pain issues and these plants have the added benefit of also assisting with the emotional component of pain such as anxiety and difficulty sleeping. Plants like henbane and mandrake are so effective that they are even used very effectively during labor to ease the pain of childbirth.
Some wonderful and powerful herbal medicine can also be found in the spice cabinet. Spices like turmeric, and ginger are two of the most powerful anti- inflammatories on the planet. These plants are natural COX-2 inhibitors; they are the alternative medicine answer to the popular pharmaceutical drugs Celebrex and Vioxx. In the middle east, India and all over Asia where the diets are rich in spices like turmeric, and ginger and cayenne, where life is also far less convenient then our own, people have a far less occurrence of arthritis and chronic back pain, and continue to work very labor intensive jobs such as farming and agriculture work even into their 90’s.
There has always been an accepted school of thought in allopathic medicine that it is acceptable to injure one part of the body to heal another, thus even common over the counter NSAID pain relievers such as acetaminophen and ibuprofen, can cause long term damage, acetaminophen to the liver and ibuprofen to the kidneys, in natural pain management many plants, roots, barks, and other herbs not only antistetic in nature but they are also anti-inflammatory and anti-spasmodic as well, and herbal medicine is gentler on the system and is more synergistic with the body allowing for greater absorption of the necessary constitutes.
So you see that alternative medicine goes beyond the typically accepted ideal of treating just the symptoms and goes farther to treat many of the underlying causes as well as some of the other components involved in chronic pain conditions.