Pain-for-profit industry booming

Tuesday, February 15, 2011 by: Dr. Carolyn Dean
Tags: pain, drugs, health news

(NaturalNews) Global Industry Analysts, Inc. (GIA) released their comprehensive global report on Pain Management markets in January 2011. The Pain-for-Profit Industry is so darn lucrative that you have to pay $4500 just to read the report but I'll give you the highlights for free.

The Pain-for-Profit Industry will earn US$60 billion by the year 2015. GIA cites the following factors that are driving this growth industry:

1. An aging population worldwide
2. More surgical procedures being performed
3. Changing lifestyles (for the worse)
4. An increasing incidence of cancer

GIA claims that people want more efficient drugs and medical devices for pain treatment but they don't comment on the fact that what people really want is drugs that don't have side effects. Or better yet, healthier lifestyles so they don't get caught in the vicious cycle of pain and pain meds.

Worldwide there are 1.5 billion people suffering from chronic pain. GIA says neuropathic pain is the hardest to treat and accounts for 3 to 4.5 percent of the market. So they tell their pain industry readers to focus on finding drugs for neuropathic pain because it's an open market!

No, they don't talk about magnesium, MSM or chiropractic treatment and massage therapy. Of course they don't tell you that none of the long list of drugs and devices listed as pain management money-makers actually address the root causes of a person's pain. They are designed to only ameliorate symptoms. Nor do they tell you that most pain drugs have serious side effects up to and including death.

GIA's focus is entirely on prescription pain meds and patented devices. And they still talk about new blockbuster drugs that are coming down the pike. It seems they haven't learned from the Vioxx scandal and maybe they missed the studies showing that all analgesics have side effects. They do comment that safety and side effects are the major challenges confronted by drug developers. They fail to mention that safety and side effects are much more of a challenge to people taking these drugs.

Of course, some of these drugs and devices can be life-saving for people suffering from pain due to serious accidents, broken bones and some specific maladies. In real life, however, weight gain, inactivity, lack of exercise, and accumulated toxins and poisons from vaccines, medications, dental amalgams, and what you are eating, drinking, smoking, and breathing are the main causes.

Inflammation is part and parcel of dealing with pain because your body reacts with an inflammatory response - heat, swelling, and pain - when it encounters anything irritating.

Pain and inflammation can start when you are about 15 pounds overweight. That extra pressure on your hips, knees and ankles can result in swelling and a tiny bit of fluid pressing on a joint, which can cause pain and starts the whole vicious cycle. If you have pain you don't exercise which makes your joints stiffer. When you go to your doctor, he may not even weigh you but very quickly offers you some medicine for your so-called arthritis. You are also told that when your joint is in real bad shape you will be scheduled for a joint replacement. It's as simple as that, yet nobody tells you that with some discipline on your part, you can get rid of that pain.

Ever since aspirin came on the scene at the turn of the 20th Century, modern medicine has been awash with all kinds of pain killing agents and devices which make it possible for people to ignore the warning signals from their bodies that something is wrong. I learned acupuncture in an elective program I created in second year medicine because I knew even then that there were no safe treatments for pain.

If we don't take our body's pain message to heart, we gobble quick-fix drugs to silence the signal at the same time putting more and more burden on our bodies, which creates a vicious cycle of even more inflammation and more pain and, unfortunately, for many users of these drugs, a catastrophic stroke, heart attack, or death.

No more vivid an example of suppressing the pain message are the hundreds of thousands of people who took Vioxx on the advice of their MDs. Studies now show that as many as 55,000 may have died using this drug while tens of thousands more have to live with Vioxx-damaged hearts or suffering from damage caused by strokes such as paralysis, blindness, epileptic seizures and the like.

Vioxx was developed as a COX-2 selective, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID). In short, it was developed to bring down the inflammation and swelling associated with pain. It was intended for people with pain and inflammation from osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, management of short-term pain, treatment of menstrual pain and migraine headaches. Since Vioox was pulled from the market much research has been done to find a safe NSAID, but to no avail.

In January 2011 the British Medical Journal reported a meta analysis on the cardiovascular safety of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs NSAIDs. The researchers analyzed a total of 31 major studies that included 116,429 patients taking naproxen, ibuprofen, diclofenac, celecoxib, etoricoxib, lumiracoxib, rofecoxib. They found that all NSAIDs produced cardiovascular side effects.

Senior investigator Peter Juni, MD, from the University of Bern in Switzerland, said his team expected to see an increased risk but was surprised by the magnitude of the signal. "We never thought we'd see two- and four-fold increased risks," he said. "The doses were admittedly high," he pointed out, "however, this is clearly clinically relevant."

Most people and many doctors don't really have a clue what these drugs do to your body. To some, the drug magically rushes to the pain spots to quell the crisis. Few people ever consider that the rest of your body is assaulted by toxic chemicals that create havoc everywhere else. Your liver tries to make the chemicals less toxic and tries to eliminate them but in some cases the liver ends up transforming these chemicals into even more toxic metabolites that further disrupt your health. Your immune system comes into play, also, by attacking the drug thus creating even more inflammation. When that happens, not knowing what is actually going on, most doctors will just tell you to double the dose.

I'm not against every modern medical product or treatment modality on the market but I urge you to READ the package insert of any drug you may be thinking of taking then ask yourself - do I really want to take this stuff? Package inserts are required by law because consumer groups fought for access to information so we could have the facts before taking the drug. While this information is usually typed in such small print you need a magnifying glass to read it, this same information, along with information from other sources is splattered all over the net, so there is really no reason not to know the side effects of any drug you are taking.

Toxic drugs and expensive pain devices are not the only pain and inflammation treatments on the market. And remember what I said at the beginning - weight gain, inactivity, lack of exercise, and accumulated toxins and poisons from vaccines, medications, dental amalgams, and what you are eating, drinking, smoking, and breathing are the main causes of pain and inflammation. I don't sell products but on my website under Resources there is a list of products I regularly recommend for pain such as magnesium and clay detox baths. I'll address the underlying problem of yeast overgrowth as one significant cause of inflammation and pain in future articles.


About the author:
About the Author:
Carolyn Dean MD ND is The Doctor of the Future�. She is a medical doctor and naturopathic doctor in the forefront of the natural medicine revolution since 1979.
She is working on several patents on novel products including the iCell in RnA Drops. Dr. Dean is a leading expert in magnesium and she has created a picometer, stabilized-ionic form of magnesium, called ReMag that's 100% absorbed at the cellular level and non-laxative making it one of the only magnesiums that can be taken in therapeutic amounts with no side effects. ReLyte is her multiple mineral product that is also completely absorbed at the cellular level and contains the 9 minerals necessary for supporting proper thyroid function. RnA Drops help make perfect cells via RNA through Chromosome 14 affecting DNA. ReNew, which is highly concentrated RnA Drops is a powerful skin serum and ReAline is a safe detox formula with methylated B's, l-taurine and dl-methionine (the precursor to glutathione), all available at www.RnAReSet.com
Dr. Dean is the author/coauthor of 33 health books (print and eBooks) and 106 Kindle books including The Magnesium Miracle, Death by Modern Medicine, IBS for Dummies, IBS Cookbook for Dummies, The Yeast Connection and Women's Health, Future Health Now Encyclopedia, Death by Modern Medicine, Everything Alzheimers, and Hormone Balance.
She is on the Medical Advisory Board of the non-profit educational site - Nutritional Magnesium Association (www.nutritionalmagnesium.org).
Dr. Dean has a free online newsletter and a valuable online 2-year wellness program called Completement Now! at www.drcarolyndean.com/fhn. She also runs a busy telephone consulting practice and has a weekly radio show Mondays at 4pm PST on www.achieveradio.com. Find out more at www.drcarolyndean.com, www.drcarolyndeanlive.com, www.RnAReSet.com, and www.howionic.com.