Addiction Nation
Our biggest public health problem costing $524 billion (including lost wages and costs to the public health care and criminal justice systems) each year. The majority of the estimated 20 million alcoholics and drug addicts in America (and millions more compulsive gamblers, overeaters and sex addicts, if you accept an expanded understanding of addiction) never get help.
Those who do often relapse repeatedly, sometimes returning to treatment centers 5, 10 or 15 times (if they don’t die first).
And many of those who ‘recover’ simply trade one addiction for another addicts call this dance switching seats on the Titanic.
A pain and addiction specialist in Fairfax, Va., told me: If we take the fact that 10 percent of the population has the disease of addiction, and if we say that pain is the most common presentation to a doctor’s office, please tell me why the interface of pain and addiction is not part of the core curriculum of health care training in the United States? Will Rowe, the executive director of the American Pain Foundation, notes that pain education is still barely on the radar in most medical schools.