Addiction and Pain Pain rots the soul. Opioids can effectively treat pain – and then rot the soul and body. The treatment of pain remains a difficult dilemna for the whole country. A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine highlights the opiod mess in a a new way, demonstrating how one prescription […]
How to Treat Insomnia Part II (Including When You’re Older)
Insomnia afflicts the majority of Americans over 65. It makes many people miserable, but can be aided or even erased by relatively simple techniques. Insomnia’s causes are many and complex, including changes in body clocks, types of illnesses, effects of medications, and the process of aging itself (see part I.) Fortunately, most treatments of insomnia, […]
Why Can’t Older Folks Sleep? (Part I)
Sleep and insomnia increase with age. Most studies find the inability to get proper rest affects the majority of folks past the age of 65 (Lots of younger people can’t sleep, either.) There are dozens of known reasons people can’t sleep. Here’s some of the most prominent. Aging Changes Sleep Take a newborn. Many neonates will […]
Why Don’t People Sleep?
“Can’t I just treat my insomnia with a book?” My interlocutor was sure there was a book out there (including one of my mine) that “could get me to sleep just fine.” Certainly many could do with a brief bout of Sleep School – understanding how sleep affects their health, performance, pleasure, pain, income and mortality […]
The Pain Mess
Pain rots the soul. Pain scourges the body. Sadly, so does the present day treatment of chronic pain. What was a problem has become a national mess with thousands dying yearly and millions more suffering. Fashion may be the arbiter in social media, but it is a poor selector for health treatments. For many years it was […]