Your health and health care — Part one

“Prescription drugs cause most of the more than 26,000 fatal overdoses each year,” says Leonard J. Paulozzi, M.D. of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

by Sherry Anshara — 

What if your health and your health care are connected in such a way that it is not always obvious? The usual protocol to follow is that if something in your body does not feel right, the first step is to schedule tests, such as blood work, or to ask the experts for advice.

From the test results or the experts’ opinions, a diagnosis is made. Do not get emotional and become the diagnosis, however. Find out the protocol. Do not look for the cure; look for a way to heal yourself. Remember that you “cure” ham and meat. You do not “cure” humans.

Some current statistics have rendered interesting data. In the last couple of months of 2010, it was found that more people died from prescription drug overdoses than from illegal street drugs. So what is going on? Is it a cure to take drugs, overdose on them and die?

The message is that you must become totally involved in your healing process and make it a progressive one; otherwise, you will get progressively sicker.

Some very poignant conversations are going on within the medical community. “Addiction to prescription painkillers, which kill thousands of Americans a year, has become a largely unrecognized epidemic, experts say. In fact, prescription drugs cause most of the more than 26,000 fatal overdoses each year,” says Leonard J. Paulozzi, M.D. of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Wow — 26,000 deaths. This is an eye-opener and an “aha” moment. What about the deaths that are not reported as fatal prescription drug overdoses? And what about the other people involved in those 26,000 reported deaths, like family members, friends and employers? Are they not responsible on some level? What about everyone else involved? Civilian and medical communities, as well as drug and insurance companies are all dealing with this issue, and it is a growing problem.

Prescription drug abuse must now be looked at from a new perspective. Who is taking prescription drugs responsibly? Who is prescribing these drugs responsibly? Is this type of addiction beginning to outpace addictions to alcohol and street drugs? These are some of the pertinent questions to ask.

We must also consider the societal ramifications. How many people die needlessly from prescription drugs? What is the emotional cost to families and friends? What is the economic cost to society?

The number of fatal overdoses from opioid painkillers — opium-like drugs that include morphine and codeine — more than tripled between 1999 and 2006, ending with 13,800 deaths in 2006, according to CDC statistics. Unless the hooked-on-prescription-drug crisis is recognized, people will continue to die. Our population could potentially decline. The economic loss will be significant, not to mention the emotional setbacks for everyone involved.

In past decades, most overdoses were due to illegal narcotics, such as heroin, and most of those deaths occurred in big cities. Prescription painkillers have surpassed heroin and cocaine, and overdoses are now about as high in rural areas — 7.8 deaths per 100,000 people — as in cities, where the rate is 7.9 deaths per 100,000 people, according to a paper published last year in Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety.

This is not just an urban problem. These statistics reveal that prescription drug abuse crosses all geographical areas, cultures, ethnic backgrounds, economies and religions. Wake up, America! Who is running your show and your life?

Prescription drugs are supposed to support wellness, not cause death. Forget about blaming the medical community or the pharmaceutical companies. They are just looking at the bottom line for their stockholders. This is much worse than the dumbing-down of Americans — this is the needless killing of Americans.

“The biggest and fastest-growing part of America’s drug problem is prescription drug abuse,” says Robert DuPont, a former White House drug czar and a former director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “The statistics are unmistakable.”

“About 120,000 Americans a year go to the emergency room after overdosing on opioid painkillers,” says Laxmaiah Manchikanti, chief executive officer and board chairman for the American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians. “Experts say it is easy to see why so many Americans are abusing painkillers. There are lots of drugs around and they are relatively easy to get,” says David Zvara, chair of anesthesiology at University of North Carolina Hospitals.

An accidental premature death is not a viable solution if your aim is to live a long, productive life. In myriad cases, drugs do not resolve anything, except to make you sicker (when they are used excessively and inappropriately).

Now is the time for all of us to begin taking back our health and health care. When your body is in pain, what is it saying to you? Where is the pain? Specific areas of your body relate to specific emotional and physical issues. Ask yourself why you have pain. In some cases, emotional issues can be at the core of your physical discomforts.

An actual emotional and physical problem could have started in childhood or young adulthood and triggered your emotional hooks to the past. This caused your body to experience a reaction, thereby setting the ball in motion for physical pain. Emotional trauma is physical trauma; they go hand in hand.

Pain prompts your body to get your attention. Surely this is a paradigm shift; so now is the time for you to be your own paradigm shifter, and stop looking outside of yourself for answers. Connect with your body, as often the answers are within.

A most amazing aspect of your body is its resiliency to survive a lifetime of emotional trauma, as well as emotional and physical abuse. And a wonderful aspect of being fully human is our ongoing quest for information. Whether the answers come from laboratory tests, blood work or expert evaluations, it is how you use the information that counts.

(Continued next issue.)

Sherry Anshara is a medical intuitive, author, founder of the QuantumPathic Center of Consciousness, creator of the QuantumPathic® Energy Method and founder/president of the Blended Healthcare Consortium in Scottsdale, Ariz. 480-609-0874. www.quantumpathic.com, www.sherryanshara.com or sherryanshara@quantumpathic.com.

Reprinted from AzNetNews, Volume 30, Number 4, Aug/Sept 2011.