How many of you have taken an anti-inflammatory or painkiller, whether it was prescribed by a doctor or not, that either didn't work or just didn't 'agree' with you? How many of you know someone who has had a critical or fatal drug reaction? Because drugs are so commonly prescribed as a first line of defense against pain, the term "side effect" has seemingly lost its impact on the public.

Every time you swallow a painkiller, the stomach breaks it down and it is absorbed into the bloodstream, where it is delivered to all of the body's cells. The drug is not specific. The drug cannot target the actual source of pain, although most drug commercials indicate otherwise. It does not work WITH your body to offer a solution. Rather, it works AGAINST your body to cover up and mask the normal operations of your body's cells. They can be effective with symptoms, but do nothing to address why your body's cells are reacting the way they are. Painkillers and anti-inflammatories are known to break down the lining of the stomach. They can cause gastro-intestinal bleeding and stomach pain. They can cause dizziness, drowsiness, nausea, constipation, and many other harmful side effects. Long-term use can lead to kidney failure, liver damage, kidney cancer, heart attacks, and other major complications.

"Each year [in America], the side effects of long-term non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug use causes nearly 103,000 hospitalizations and 16,500 deaths," reports an article printed on Nov. 26, 2005 in Medical News Today. On Sept. 10, 1999, BBC released an article entitled "Regular Painkiller Use Linked to Cancer." The article describes a study published in the British Journal of Cancer, which found that "regular use of all the major types of over-the-counter painkillers could raise the chance of developing renal cell carcinoma, which accounts for the vast majority of kidney cancer cases." In the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), April 15, 1998, a study was done that assessed adverse drug reaction prevalence in American hospitals. They stated:

"We estimated that in 1994 overall 2216000 (1721000-2711000) hospitalized patients had serious ADRs and 106000 (76000-137000) had fatal ADRs[adverse drug reactions], making these reactions between the fourth and sixth leading cause of death." And who can forget the withdrawal of Vioxx, a popular drug for arthritis taken off the market because of its devastating link to cardiovascular complications?

The studies and statistics seem endless, yet they have done little to deter the average person from swallowing various drugs on a regular basis. The Independent revealed a study by the British Medical Association stating that the average number of over-the-counter painkillers purchased by the average person in the UK is 373 per year! That doesn't even include doctor prescription painkillers, which would increase the number of painkillers consumed per person significantly. Studies are constantly making links between drugs and their negative consequences to your health and yet somehow we still manage to trust. Most drug commercials verbally spout a long list of devastating possible complications while visually distracting the viewer with calming landscapes and contented people, associating the deleterious effects of drugs with feelings of "normal" and acceptable. When these commercials first began, I remember many patients of mine laughing with a tinge of incredulity as they listed the possible drug reactions as being far worse than the conditions these drugs were designed to help with. Now most people don't even bat an eye. These commercials have been normalized to the viewers.

Side Effects To Painkillers in Vernon BC

Many professionals I talk to believe these "side effects" are your body's way of telling you that what you just swallowed is hazardous, even poisonous. In fact, the term "side effect" is misleading, as any reaction you have from a drug is a "direct effect" of that drug, whether or not the effect was intended. Just think about that. The word "side-effect" can make you feel that if an effect you experience from swallowing a drug happens to be unsavory, that this effect was not really intended and only happens rarely - that the unsafe reaction the drug created was an issue with how your body reacted, and not really the fault or intention of the drug. That to me is the psychology of the word. Why not call them what they are? They are all direct effects.

If drugs are being pulled off the market because of dangerous complications affecting hundreds of thousands of people, and studies are warning against the addictive and harmful effects of drug use both in the short-term and long-term, can you really trust the man-made chemical pills you are swallowing?

This issue is certainly not a new one, and it is often debated inside medical circles whom are following these trends and between people who regularly prescribe these medications and alternative health care providers who try to find alternatives to drugs. I am happy to note most medical doctors I meet today try to take a conservative approach with regards to drug use with their patients, and that is becoming more appreciated by a more informed public. These professionals are becoming more accepting of alternative doctors and therapists, educating themselves on what we do, so we can all work towards helping patients out of pain with fewer drugs. Chiropractic and other alternative therapies rate very high on effectiveness with pain and with patient satisfaction, and as more medical doctors and alternative doctors work together, a burden is taken off the medical system, freeing resources to help with more severe conditions than pain, conditions that medical staff are much more effective at treating.

The reason I chose to address painkillers and anti-inflammatories specifically is because these are common drugs that my patients take, and they are the drugs my patients ask me about the most. The most common symptom I help people overcome is pain. Since I am a Chiropractor, naturally I try to advise patients to slowly wean themselves off these two specific drugs so they can begin feeling their body more closely, listening to the language it is using to tell its story. As I begin helping a patient's body realign, we usually see the body's need for inflammation subside. Pain and inflammation are symptoms that the body creates as part of a larger process to heal an area that is under persistent stress or stain.

To understand this, inflammation has 5 components: redness, swelling, pain, heat, and loss of function. Each symptom helps bring oxygen and immune cells to the area to repair and heal. Numbing pain and suppressing the inflammation process artificially with drugs antagonizes the very choice your body has made to heal itself. They block the process of awareness your body imposes to safeguard your future against further injury. They subdue the very army of cells your body tries to mobilize to clean up the wreckage of the injured area. The inflammatory process directs these immune cells to take out the trash, so to speak, and to help build a new internal landscape. This process needs to be empowered, not disabled.

Imagine twisting your ankle. It hurts. It swells. It turns red. It heats up, and you can't walk on it. Now imagine swallowing medication so your cells can no longer perform these necessary actions? Now you can't feel the pain as badly, so you begin walking on it gently. The torn ligaments have not repaired themselves yet, and you do more damage because you have artificially blocked your brain from registering the damage in your ankle. As a result, the healing process takes longer, and now the scar tissue that forms is even weaker when it finally heals, making it more prone to re-injury. Not to mention that the ankle is likely going to heal in a misaligned pattern, making it much more likely to re-sprain, and then becomes a chronic pain problem. The altered biomechanics of the ankle over the long term can create other related issues, like knee pain and back pain, which I am usually consulted about down the road.

The same process holds true for any area of the body, including sprains and strains of the spine and neck joints. If, after an injury, the spinal vertebrae are left misaligned, they will continue to be painful and inflamed because they are under long-term strain. The body creates pain to alert you. Many people I meet take pain medications for years without realizing that the real problem is the spinal misalignment, not the pain. Their drugs-for -pain treatment strategy only led to a bigger problem in the long-term-a more toxic body facing all the risks that drugs offer, a bunch of weakened scar tissue surrounding the misalignment, and arthritis around the original injury site.

I understand that everyone needs a little relief, and I can accept that painkiller and anti-inflammatory drug use in the short-term can provide that. I also understand that these drugs, taken in the short-term, cause fairly little risk. But I object to painkillers and anti-inflammatories for long-term use, particularly when this treatment is sought as the only strategy to counter pain without addressing why the body is reacting the way it is.

If you suffer from pain, rather than gobbling down drugs in an attempt to numb your body to the sensations, try asking a new question: Why is my body creating this feeling and how can I empower it to heal better?

From a Chiropractic perspective, the answer is to discover whether your body has proper alignment, and to support it by reducing any misalignment stress that is so often the cause of spinal pain. My wellness center also offers traditional Chinese acupuncture, registered massage therapy, physiotherapy, spinal decompression therapy, and yoga-all of which can bring the body into better balance and health. Naturopathic doctors also look to support the body's healing mechanisms with more natural products that offer fewer side effects. All of these approaches, alone or combined, often create a winning solution to pain without resorting to drugs at all.