Change Your Brain Every Day - Pain Medication: The Pros & Cons

Episode Date: June 3, 2019

The usage of pain medication can be a helpful tool in coping with an injury or illness, but the fact is, some people really need pain meds and some really don’t. Add to the equation the various side effects and potential for addiction, and this delineation becomes even more critical. In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen introduce the concept of “Skills or Pills?” to illustrate when it may be necessary to use pain medication, and when you can utilize other, more natural techniques to help get you through the painful times.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Well, welcome back. We're so excited for this week. We're excited for every week. Skills or pills? Question mark.

Such an interesting topic. So often people come to us here at Amen Clinics and they go, I don't want to take medication. And they may be floridly psychotic. We're all like, no, you need medication. Well, we also have people though that come in and they're like, I don't want to do all that. That's too hard. Can't I just take a pill? So there's both sides of that we need to discuss. Some people don't trust natural supplements or psychotherapy.

And they want a quick fix, which generally is not quick. Right. And other people, they're so afraid of medication because of the horror stories they've heard. Or the stigma. Or the stigma attached to it. Nobody wants a psychiatric illness. And so you actually didn't even want to date a psychiatrist no they're all crazy so we have this uh we have this stigma among our own relationships um but you know i learned this a long time ago in dealing with children who have ADD, is that

parents would actually believe that they were a bad parent if they allowed me to write prescriptions for medication for a child's mind. You know, it's an interesting thing, and we should talk about the psychological part of this, because even I had thyroid cancer, and then it caused all sorts of other problems with my health. So there are a few medications I will take for the rest of my life. And I remember feeling like, and that's not a psychiatric thing, but I remember feeling like probably three or four times, I'm going to find a better way because I'm smart.

I'm going to find a better way. I don't want to be, quote, unquote, defective. So because I'm superwoman, and I'm going to find a better way because I'm smart. I'm going to find a better way. I don't want to be quote unquote defective. So, because I'm superwoman and I'm going to fix this. I'm going to figure it out. And I remember trying to go off my medication like three or four. Off your thyroid medication? How dumb is that? Yeah. And the other medications. Well, it's actually very common among teenagers and young adults who have diabetes. So diabetes is actually a great analogy. So this is a lethal disorder that if you don't take your insulin, if you're a type one diabetic, you could die. There's no way out of type one diabetes. And kids, they feel like they're going to live forever. And so they don't take their medication,

they fool people, and then they end up in a diabetic coma. Yeah. I'm like, I'm going to find a natural way. So this is not just related to mental health issues. But my point is we have to figure out what the psychological piece of that is. Why do people feel defective if they need help with something, right? Well, and mind meds are very different than heart meds or liver meds or kidney meds or antibiotics. So we're not anti-medication.

We're against the indiscriminate use of medication. We don't want you taking medication you don't need. We'd rather you do everything that you can first to avoid it, correct? Like non-toxic, least toxic, most effective, as you always say. But when it comes down to it, if there's something that's going to save your life or literally just transform the quality of your life, we don't want you to feel bad about that. Like I don't feel bad about it anymore. I'm like, my life feels great. I feel great. My energy is good. I'm healthy. I'm over it. Right. So I'm just like,

this is the way life is. So skills or pills. Or both. Or both. And my thought is it depends. Right. And over this week, we're going to talk about pain. We're going to talk about pain we're going to talk about anxiety depression adb and just look at you know skills or pills and we recently had someone we love go on pain medication after surgery and it was not good well and it scared all of us because- It changed her personality. And what a lot of people don't know is that opiates in particular, they are a short-term fix. And some people will kill themselves without it being in such dire pain. But opiates actually increase the number of pain fibers. So they make you more sensitive to pain.

When you stop taking them. And it pisses off white blood cells, which means the white blood cells become angrier and more aggressive. More active. And they attack the areas that have been hurt. So the opiates are really creating more pain and they're insidious in that once you start them, it's super hard to stop them. Oh, by the way, you also become desensitized so that if you need them again in the future, they often can change a person's personality

and make them angrier and more irritable. So what do you do? And what we found in our friend is that Lamictal, which is not Lamictal. No, Lyrica. Lyrica. Lyrica. Actually worked better. Worked better.

And it's not creating more pain fibers. What it's doing is it's settling down the pain centers in the brain. And so both of those are medications. It doesn't attach to the opiate receptor. But one is addictive. One is really hard to stop. One is not. But there are, you know, I think of opiates for short-term pain relief, like after surgery, but get rid of them as quickly as you can. Otherwise, they're going to cause addiction and dependence. But there are also natural ways. So I was walking this morning,

and I do that most mornings. And you remember a couple of years ago, I thought I was going to have to have a knee surgery because it was just so hard to walk because of the pain in my knees from playing football in high school and college. But when I change my diet, when I get rid of gluten and dairy, sugar, corn and soy, and I take curcumins, omega-3 fatty acids, and SAMe, I don't have pain. Right. And I was just so happy this morning. Because the inflammation comes down. Because I was thinking about it. So speaking of mental health related to medication, that's also true.

You can do things to make it better or make it worse with your lifestyle that might make the difference of whether you take medication or whether you take as much medication. If you're in chronic pain or even short-term pain, it causes anxiety, it causes depression. And I became interested in pain many years ago as I got very interested in hypnosis because one of its best uses is decreasing pain. And when I was at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, they actually used it after surgery. So they'd compare the amount of pain medications a person would use if they had been hypnotized before surgery or not. So I have to talk about this for a second because I do my meditation with, and I do

sort of a self-hypnosis that I've been doing for a while. And I absolutely 100% notice that when I do it consistently, I feel this, it's almost like a sense of being medicated. It's like this joy, this happiness, and everything in my body feels better, right? My mood, pain, everything feels better. My back feels better. When I don't do it, I'm far more sensitive to not only pain, but just being annoyed with people.

It's almost like a medication. So emotional pain. Absolutely. So when you don't do it, you actually cause emotional pain in other people like me. Because I get irritated more easily. You know, there's actually some fascinating new research on pain medications like Tylenol and ibuprofen that even though it decreases pain in you, it also decreases your empathy for other people. And so as you don't feel pain, you also don't feel other people's-

Sort of like alcohol. You're not feeling other people's pain. So when it comes to pain, yes, sometimes it's so bad, you have to be on pain medications. But I think the goal needs to be, how can I take the least amount possible? And one of my favorite stories of all times is Norman Cousins, who was the editor of the Saturday evening review or the Saturday evening post a long time ago and he was diagnosed with something

called ankylosing spondylitis which is an autoimmune disorder where his body was attacking his spine and he was in a great amount of pain on a lot of pain medication that damaged the quality of his life and he just hated it and he went to doctor after doctor and it didn't work and he got this idea that when he laughed he felt better and so he locked himself in a hotel room in Los Angeles for 500 hours with comedy tapes like Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy. And he laughed for 500 hours. And at the end of a couple of weeks, he didn't have pain anymore. And he wrote a book about this called The Anatomy of an Illness, which I read when I was a college student.

And it had this big impact on me that maybe there's another way to deal with pain besides just taking medication. And our friend, Rabbi G. So Rabbi G started a nonprofit organization. It just, it's mind blowing to me and I love it so much. So he is a fellow black belt in karate, which I just love. And he lost his daughter to leukemia when she was two. And he saw this incredible pain that she went through and he was so devastated and so heartbroken seeing his little two-year-old daughter going through this, that he started this organization called Kids Kicking

Cancer. They go all over the world. And so back then they didn't have even what they have now for kids, right? Going through this process of cancer. And so with all of the chemo and the radiation and the painful procedures they were doing, they would just tie them down and let them scream. So he started going all over the world. And what they would do is go in and they would teach these kids the breathing techniques basically that we use in martial arts. So these breathing techniques and visualization, and they would teach them to kiai and they would teach them basically to visualize the entire process without like that they were going to visualize this whole process with being in an empowered state and not feeling pain. And they would visualize the whole thing being finished,

right? With them being in this powerful state. It was, it's incredible. The stories that came out of this, these kids would often look up and go, well, wait, when are they going to start? And it was done. It's incredible. And that's one of the reasons I love karate so much because it's an empowering sport. And so when I was told not to do it, I noticed that I felt weaker. I felt more pain in general throughout my day. When I do karate, I just have to do it in a safer way now, I don't feel as much pain because it's empowering because my mind goes to a more empowering place. Well, and the part of that that is so healing is the visualization,

which is a part of hypnosis that is so powerful. So it often starts with breathing and then visualization. And I love that part. And I remember when I was an intern at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, I hypnotized like everybody. I was having so much fun with it, but I would use it a lot for procedures. And if I had to do a lumbar puncture on someone, or I had to draw their blood, especially children, that the first thing I would do, and it would only take a few minutes, is put them in a trance and get their mind somewhere else. But it's not magic. It's not. It's a skill you develop over time that can be incredibly helpful.

I even did that with a painful medical procedure that I was having. They wanted to give me anesthesia. And I don't like having anesthesia when I don't have to, because I've had so much of it for health reasons. So I don't, it's like, this to me was not a big procedure, but they don't want it. They want to put you under anesthesia mostly for their convenience. Cause they don't want you wincing and moving and, you know, crying out in pain. So I'm like, I'm not doing anesthesia. You're going to have to do it without it. And I put on my, my headphones, they were arguing with me through this whole thing where I'm like, I'm not doing anesthesia. You're going to have to do it without it. And I put on my headphones. They were arguing with me through this whole thing. I'm like, it's not going to happen.

So I put my headphones on and I did my visualization and my self-hypnosis through the whole procedure. They were mind blown, actually. It was really cool. I didn't feel anything. I didn't feel any pain at all. skills or pills, question mark, when it comes to opiate pain medications and addictive pain medications, short-term and as little as possible, at the same time, you want to increase your skill, especially guided imagery, hypnosis, diaphragmatic breathing, meditation. And certain supplements can help with the pain that comes from inflammation, like omega-3 fatty acids, BrainMD. We have the best

omega-3. I take it every day, omega-3 power. Also, brain curcumins. Curcumins have an anti-inflammatory effect. They also help with pain. They also help with your mood. And one of my favorite supplements over the years I take every day is SAMe, sedenosylmethionine, which has good studies for both depression and pain. So we would love to hear what you've done, what you guys have done to manage your pain, especially if it has been natural or through supplements or through meditation. Share this information with someone you know that is suffering.

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