Author of The Painful Truth
“Babies Born Addicted,” “Addicted Babies,” “Babies with Addiction,” and similar headlines appear nearly daily in the media. This is because babies exhibit horrible withdrawal symptoms if they are born physically dependent on opioids, and it pulls at our heartstrings to see them suffer. But it misleads media consumers, policymakers, and family members into believing the newborns are addicted. They confuse signs of withdrawal with opioid addiction.
I like a million other people who have commented on your blog live with debilitating chronic pain each and every day…… I wanted to know from you is there a place where we chronic pain sufferers can go to plead our cases, to be heard? Is there a way we can get our word out? Is there anyone that will listen to us? A politician, a news agency? anyone you can lead us to?
This is an excerpt from a comment that was recently posted on my blog.
Everyone can agree on a few things. First, we have an opioid epidemic. Second, we want to mitigate it. Third, the efforts we’ve seen at the national level to ameliorate the crisis are not working.
As USA Today recently reported, the opioid epidemic is getting worse instead of better. Two top-level public officials — Dr. Debra Houry, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control and Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health — agree that whatever we’re doing to fix the epidemic doesn’t seem to be working. The amount of opioids prescribed has been declining for 5 years, but the number of overdoses has been increasing. So why are we not making progress?
Three American scientists, Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael W. Young, jointly won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. They earned the prestigious award for discovering the genes that control circadian rhythms.
The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute issued a press release that reads, “Their discoveries explain how plants, animals and humans adapt their biological rhythm so that it is synchronized with the Earth’s revolutions.” In other words, we’ve long known that human beings have biological clocks that are necessary for our good health and survival, but Hall, Rosbash, and Young were able to precisely identify the mechanisms of the “control center” for our internal clock.
