Don’t Add Drug Detox To The Expense Of Treating Your Back Pain

Who would think that having a sore neck or back could wind someone up in a drug detox program?

Yet when back pain is bad enough or lasts so long it’s intolerable, a common solution is to see your doctor. Unfortunately, such a solution can lead to even worse problems than back pain: Drug dependence, addiction and a stint in medical drug detox – not a solution to back pain in anyone’s books.

When over-the-counter pain medication isn’t handling the pain, all too many physicians prescribe narcotic painkillers such as OxyContin. We’ve all heard about how prescription drugs are fuelling a big increase in drug Medical Detox statistics, and OxyContin addiction is right up there with the worst of them.

According to a new study, we are spending more money than ever on our aching backs and necks. The costs of treating back and neck pain have risen so much in the past decade that you might be tempted to call it “a pain in the neck.” From 1997 through 2006, spending on aching backs and necks rose 65%. In 2005 alone, we spent $86 billion dollars treating our spinal problems.

And here’s a no-surprise: The largest share of the costs were on painkillers. We spent $20 billion – a 171% increase from 1997 – on drugs for neck and back pain. And it’s also no surprise that narcotic painkillers such as OxyContin saw increases of 400%.

Interestingly, in that same decade, OxyContin addiction also rose by at least that much, if not more. It’s a frequent occurrence for people taking OxyContin per their prescriptions to develop an OxyContin addiction that can require medical drug detox when they want to get off the drug.

Of course, “OC”, “Ox”, or “Oxy”, as it’s known on the streets, has become one of the country’s most-abused illicit narcotics, possibly surpassing heroin, morphine and methadone in the numbers of medical drug detox admissions. As well as a big increase in drug detox statistics, OxyContin addiction and abuse has led to hundreds of injuries and deaths, and led Purdue Pharma, the drug’s maker, to one of the largest court settlements in history. Purdue was assessed $635 million in fines last year for withholding evidence of just how addictive OxyContin really is.

If you are suffering from chronic neck or back pain, and you want to avoid dependency or outright addiction, there are other approaches that may help you avoid addictive narcotics and problems such as OxyContin addiction. Osteopathy, chiropractic, physical therapy, acupuncture, even massage therapy, certain minerals, vitamins and herbs, are all worth a try. If they help, you won’t risk having to add the cost of a medical drug detox program to your back pain treatment.