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Opioid Addiction, Chiropractic, and a Single Payer Option

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I met a woman here in the Netherlands whose husband has been struggling with opioid addiction for 10 years now.

It’s hard on her, her husband, and her marriage.

Very hard.

She said that, for the last 10 years, she has been living with a different man than who she married.  She told me she’s not even sure the man she married exists anymore.

She’s been struggling with thoughts of suicide.  Her own.

Things seem to be looking up, though.  He has finally agreed to enter a rehab here in the Netherlands.

Luckily, the health care system here is such that it will not abandon them, and it will not bankrupt them.

The opioid crisis is global. Thank goodness she belongs to a health care system in which her insurance premiums are manageable, in which crisis care is covered indefinitely.

The Opioid Crisis

I find it ironic that the mainstream media has only recently “discovered” that there is an opioid addiction problem in the United States.

I assure you, there has been an opioid problem for quite a while.

Since I started my practice in 2005, I have watched many practice members and their families struggling with addiction to prescription pain medication.  I can’t tell you how horrible it has been to watch my patients’ families ripped apart, and even lose their lives, because they or their loved one cannot break their addiction to pain killers.

I can’t tell you how sad it makes me that my daughter personally knows young people whose friends have died from heroine addiction after they were unable to obtain opioid pain killers from their “suppliers” anymore.

This shouldn’t be a thing.

It’s a scary world we live in when the United States, the richest country in the world, comes in #36 in the Save the Children’s “The End of Childhood Report” the world in terms of the quality of life our children experience.

What are we doing to secure the emotional, physical, and spiritual health of our children and our families?

Right now, from The Netherlands, I’m watching the U.S. health care debacle unfold.

Listen. I was not happy with The Affordable Care Act (ACA) that President Obama put forth a few years ago.  It is FAR from perfect. The most glaring omission is a single-payer option.

But the insurance situation right now in the U.S. is better than it was in 2011, I can tell you that.

Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a health care bill that would dismantle much of the progress the ACA made.

Now the senate wants to push through a plan that will not only roll back time to the dark days before the ACA, but will make it WORSE, especially for our parents and children.

The Congressional Budget Committee evaluated the bill and determined that 22 million people’s current health insurances are in peril.

More: the cuts in the senate bill will roll back Medicare/Medicaid benefits that help pay the treatment for people struggling with opioid addiction.

Many of our parents, our children, our neighbors, and possibly even we, WILL die if they do this.

Tell them to stop

Call your senators and tell them to stop this nonsense.

It is outrageous that our future is at risk because our politicians are so short-sighted. Our government needs to own up to its responsibilities as our servants – not our killers via neglect.

Our kids need our support in the home and in our communities.

We have to stay healthy

In any case, we need to make your that our and our families’ inner and outer environments are clear of toxins, trauma, and emotional stress so that we won’t fall victim to the United State’s dysfunctional health care system.

As a doctor of chiropractic, I have known for a long while that chiropractic is an effective and affordable health care delivery method.

Health care. Not “sick” care.

Chiropractic care is health care. It keeps our bodies and minds healthy, minimizing our need for sick care.

Kids, as well as adults, respond well to chiropractic care, especially in terms of how chiropractic helps us to adapt to our environment.

Last year, the National Institutes of Health released the results of a survey of 2011 utilization of chiropractic care by younger disabled Medicare patients and its correlation of opioid use.

They found that those patients who were receiving chiropractic treatment used much less opioids than patients who did not use chiropractic care under their Medicare plans.

That was in 2011 – BEFORE the Affordable Care Act.

Now, our politicians are planning roll back these benefits, and many others.

Tell Them You Want A Single Payer Option

Call your senators and congressmen RIGHT NOW to tell them you want them to vote no on this current health care bill.

But it’s not enough to call your senators and congressmen to tell them you oppose what they are doing.  They need to know that, if they’re going to craft a new health care bill, we need A SINGLE PAYER OPTION.

Also, we need to make sure that chiropractic care – as well as other natural forms of health care — are included in that option!

As of this writing, he senate pushed back the vote on their health care bill until after the July 4 recess.

They’re hoping to rally support around it, and they’re hoping we forget about it.

Call your senators and congressmen RIGHT NOW and tell them.

https://www.senate.gov/senators/contact/

http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/

There’s no time to lose. Government is supposed to serve us.

Our families need us.

Guest Post: Jack Tricarico on Tai Chi

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I’ve known Jack Tricarico for going on three and a half years now. 

Jack is an accomplished painter and poet from New York City. He also teaches tai chi and meditation.  He is turning 80 next month.

Since I’ve known him, he has touted the practice of tai chi, and credited it with saving his sanity and his life on many occasions.  

I asked Jack to contribute his story, that it would touch the life of someone who needed to hear it; and he very generously obliged.

When you read his story, you may think that Jack is an understated fellow.  On the contrary; his personality is big and his talent wide. His work is anything but understated!

I highly encourage you to get to know him and his work. Links are provided below.

By the way: the teacher who introduced Jack to tai chi, Eddie Rodriguez, is also a talented massage therapist on New York City’s West Side,  

I refer patients to Eddie very often. A link to Eddie is below as well.

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Jack’s Story

In the year of 1988, while teaching drawing and painting to high school students at an after-school program in Manhattan, I met a young man named Eddie Rodriguez; who, at the age of 17, was already a black belt in karate, and knowledgeable of other martial art systems.

After the program ended Eddie asked me if I wanted to learn karate. I had never practiced a martial art form before then except boxing in my adolescence which I enjoyed, but had no talent for.

After a few months of practicing karate, I became bored and quit.

Shortly after Eddie again asked me if I wanted to learn tai chi, which he thought I might be better suited for.

He was right.  At the time, I had a close friend who practiced tai chi also, and it appeared to be a discipline I might enjoy learning because it looked so profoundly meditative when I watched him do it.

Before that, I had practiced yoga for a couple of years and Zen meditation sporadically. I enjoyed these disciplines for both the calmness and the energy they produced.

So, in July of 1989, at the age of 51, I began learning the Kuang Ping form of tai chi, an early Yang style technique, from Eddie.

During this time, I was in the midst of an emotionally turbulent relationship with a woman I was nevertheless rapturously in love with.

Practicing tai chi for a couple of hours daily enabled me to maintain some semblance of sanity throughout this affair.

The practice utterly reduced the stress of the continual conflict that went on, sometimes edging toward violence, between my lover and I.

A year after that relationship ended, I met someone else who I eventually married.

Since then, I have learned 3 more tai chi forms: the short Yang style which I learned from Larry Galante, the Chen style and the Yang style classical sword form which I again learned from Eddie.

I have survived 3 car accidents, which caused spinal, knee and nerve damage, and cancer since then.

Today, at 80, practicing 2 to 3 hours of tai chi and meditation daily, I feel better than I did at 30.

This routine has also helped me creatively more than I can imagine.

I am both a painter and poet. My work can be viewed at: New York Art World, web director Johanna Lisi, and Collaborative Pursuits, LLC, web director Courtney Rogers.

I thank Eddie Rodriguez and Larry Galante for teaching me tai chi. It helped save my life.

Jack Tricarico

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Jack’s paintings are available at the above links; some of his poetry is also on Amazon. For further works of his poetry, you can contact Jack through his art agent here.

Eddie Rodriguez practices massage therapy at 448 West 57th Street, Garden Level, New York, NY 10019. His contact information is here.

Something Will Beg You to Fear

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Fear is Holding Us Back

If you haven’t seen the movie, Defending Your Life, you should. It is an incredibly intelligent Albert Brooks comedy from 1991, starring Albert Brooks and Meryl Streep.

I don’t know many people who remember the movie, and that’s unfortunate.  For me, this was a bellwether story. It voiced something that I had felt for a long time, but for which I had no words.

It’s about a man who dies (needlessly) in a car accident and finds himself in Judgement City, a sort of weigh station for souls.

At Judgement City, he must defend is life, in terms of how much fear he was able to overcome. If he was judged that he overcame his fear, he could “progress forward.”

If not, he had to be “sent back (reincarnated)” to try again in a next life.

Defending Your Life did not deliver a brand new message, but it was presented in a way that I could understand in a meaningful way.

Art is like that. Each piece of art is its own perspective on a premise. It may speak to millions or one.

The premise of Defending Your Life, as I understand it, is that fear is holding us back from our evolution.

I agree.

I’m am not saying we don’t need fear.  We can’t do without fear. Fear is part of what made us.

But fear has its place.  These days, for us in the Western world, it need not take a huge place.

Have you ever driven a stick shift?

You have to play the clutch and the gas against one another as you get the car from 0-15 mph (or 0-24 kph).

You need first gear for that.  It’s important, but only for a few moments.

Imagine that you have a car.

The car is a stick shift — a manual.  It has seven gears.

Now imagine that the car you are driving is life itself.

Fear is first gear in the Car of Life.

First Gear: Fear

Fear is as old as life itself.

Without fear, creatures do not know when to remove themselves from dangerous situations. Those who don’t fear, don’t survive. Fear is primal.

I’m eating a root. There’s a big animal with sharp teeth moving toward me in the grass.  I run.  Or I kill the animal before it kills me.

That’s the “fight-or-flight” response. It is an autonomic (automatic) nervous system response called the sympathetic response.

Fear gets you away from the sharp-toothed animal.

Then I rest and eat my root.

That’s the “rest and digest” response.  That is an autonomic nervous system response, too. It’s called the parasympathetic (“around-the-sympathetic”) response.

These are primal, necessary nervous system functions, the health of which cannot be ignored. We feel them every single day.

But you can’t run a car in first gear. You’ll burn out the engine.

You have to shift to second, third, fourth, etc…

Each gear builds on the gains of the others.

Second Gear: Love

Nature decided that life should have a nurturing aspect. The very next thing that Life gave us was the ability to love and care for others.

I just ran/killed that sharp-toothed animal and now I’m eating my root.

I see my neighbor. My neighbor wasn’t so lucky. His leg is bitten and bleeding, and he’s sick.

I don’t know what to do, but my root makes me feel better. 

I share my root.

Without love, life is little more than fight/flight, rest/digest, pee/poop, birth/death, with a little sex for relief. Hopefully.

Without love, nothing beyond the will to survive is possible.

Third Gear: Forethought

This is where the animals start to separate themselves out from other animals. The act of planning is a huge evolutionary step.

I have to gather and hunt to feed myself and my family.  What if I cooperate with my neighbors? We are all good at this and that. We can take on different tasks to get the job done better and faster, and we’ll have each other’s backs.

How do I get that across to them? We need some way we can share ideas in common so we know how to collaborate.

And…

It took my tribe and I four days to hunt this animal, and another four to carry it back to the family. How do we keep it fresh until then?

Soon it will be winter and it will be difficult to find food.  How do we store our food so we can make it until spring?

Without forethought, there is no science, no logic, no language, no architecture, no innovation, no adaption. No progress.

The Fourth Gear: Choice

Without choice, we have no real autonomy and no way to communicate alternative ideas peacefully.

My aunt wants me to gather berries.  But I like to hunt.  Also, we have many people who like to pick berries.  I think we need more hunters.  I will hunt.

I can either hurt my aunt’s feelings or I can persuade her that this is a good idea.  I would rather we are both happy, because I love my aunt. I will persuade her.  

If I can’t persuade her, I can either cut myself off from her or remind her that, although I will not take her advice, I love and respect her.  I don’t want to be apart from my aunt.  I choose to tell her I love and respect her.

Without choice, there is no real respect for one another beyond fear. There is no peace.

What is the fifth gear of life?

The Fifth Gear: Wonder

Wonder is the emotional result of the realization that there are forces at work that are greater than you and your tribe.

When the moon is full, the tide is very high. When the moon is gone, the tide is low. The moon makes the water rise.  The moon must be very powerful.  I wonder how the moon does that? I wonder if the moon knows I am here?

Wonder can be painful. Sometimes pain can cause fear. Pain is sometimes necessary for growth to occur.

My father was laughing with us last night. This morning his body was here, but it was cold and he never woke up.  My father is gone.  My father’s body is beginning to turn to earth. The Earth must want my father’s body.  But without my father, I don’t know who I am, or what my life means. Where did my father go? What will happen to me? What will happen to my family?

But because we have choice, we can choose how we process pain. Wonder lets us do this.

When we kill an animal, its body is inside me, and in the earth, like my father’s body. Is the animal a part of me? Did it have a soul, like my father?  Is it part of the earth, like my father?  Are we all?

Without wonder, there is no appreciation of mystery. There is no philosophy. There is no wisdom. There is no Homo sapien.

The Sixth Gear of Life: Art

Art is our intuitive expression of wonder. Art isn’t just the appreciation of something bigger than ourselves: it is our interpretation of that which is bigger than ourselves.

The moon is beautiful. I want to draw the moon and the water.

My father was funny.  I want my daughter to know this.  I will act out stories about my father to make her laugh.

I like the way I feel when I raise my voice high and low. It makes me feel warm and wonderful. I will sing.

You may have noticed that, as the car accelerates, the car slips into the higher gears more smoothly and easily. It seems as if they are seamless.

The car slips so easily past the sixth into the seventh gear, it’s difficult to know where it began.

Seventh Gear of Life: Oneness

Oneness is not just our interpretation of that which is bigger than ourselves; it is our awareness that we and that which is bigger than ourselves are one.

When I sit very still, I feel the moon glow and the cool waters flow inside me. They are part of me.

When I act the part of my father, I feel my father inside of me. My father is still with me.

If I am still and think of the animal inside me, I feel it becoming part of me. If I let myself, I feel the animal in the earth. I feel my father inside me and in the earth. I feel we are all part of one another.

Why am I telling you all this?

Because sometime today, something is going to beg you to fear.

  • You are going to hear about xxxx who was a victim of xxxx, and the results are brutal.
  • You are going to find out that someone took away someone else’s power/rights/life.
  • You are going to face a challenge.
  • You are going to be judged, fairly or unfairly, on your talents, your looks, your skills, your wit.
  • You are going to be subject to someone else’s fear. It might look and feel like violence (in this case, it probably is).
  • Someone will believe in you, will trust you, will have faith that you will do the right thing.

When any or all of this happens, I want you to remember:

Fear causes pain. Pain can be necessary for growth. Pain can send you backward, or you can process it differently and move forward.

You have a choice. Wonder.

 

Is Failure Your Path to Freedom?

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Is failure your path to freedom?

“I can’t…”

Can’t is a four-letter word.

“I shouldn’t.”

Who says?

“But what about…”

Eliminate the word “but” from your vocabulary. Replace it with “and.” “What about” has its place during the active planning and execution of an idea – not the avoidance of your dream.

“What will they think of me?”

Do you really care, unless it is showing your children how to be an excellent person? Most people care about what you do when they feel as if they are failing at what they do. Misery loves company.

Are you showing your children how to be an excellent person by what you doing now?

showing your children

“I hate rejection.”

I do too.  I really do.  There is just no way to avoid rejection.  Rejection is a necessary step toward your success.  We all fall as our nervous systems learn how to make us walk. I hate falling, too.

“Someone told me that this is stupid, that I was being selfish and reckless. They said I would fail. they were telling me for my own good, that they wouldn’t tell me if they didn’t care.”

They were telling you that because you once relied on them for wisdom.

their wisdom never workedtheir wisdom never worked

Their wisdom never worked. Ever.

They sense that you are right, that you are leaving them behind.

Misery loves company.

Even if you love them, you cannot help them by staying with them in their misery.  You can only help them by passing them.

By the way, in this they are right:

You will fail.

Failure is the same as rejection. The only path to success is through failure after failure. Each failure is another bridge crossed toward success.

That is the secret.  That is why so few achieve success.

No one wants to fail.

Neither do I.  Failing hurts.

Failing only wins if you don’t get back up.

I tell you now: The only way to fail is to never try, or to give up too soon.

dare to fail

I am, as of this writing, fifty.  I have been failing all my life.  I was once ashamed of that, until I realized that because I relentlessly let myself fail, I am free.

I am disciplined in achieving failure. Because, with every failure, I overcome my fear.

Fear kills the body, kills the mind, deadens the spirit.

Fear is what keeps you silent when you see that things are going terribly wrong.

Dare to fail.

is failure your path to freedom

Trust that the universe has you, that falling through the door of failure leads to the path of success.

One of my great mentors, Joseph Campbell, once wrote:

 

We have not even to risk the adventure alone

for the heroes of all time have gone before us.

The labyrinth is thoroughly known …

we have only to follow the thread of the hero path.

And where we had thought to find an abomination

we shall find a God.

And where we had thought to slay another

we shall slay ourselves.

Where we had thought to travel outwards

we shall come to the center of our own existence.

And where we had thought to be alone

we shall be with all the world.”

menu of lifemenu of life

Push away that plate of, “IT’S THE SAME THING EVERY DAY.”

Be bold. Go forth and fail with determination.  Know that just beyond the bend of failure is everything you ever wanted for yourself and your family.

I gift and grant you loving permission to fail.

A Letter of Love. Are You A Sage or A Student?

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I have a confession to make.  The only things I really know for sure are the things I’ve done wrong.

I am in my 50s now; and I am old enough to realize that almost everything I thought I knew as a child, a teenager, and as a young adult, changed at some point.

When I was in college, I used to give advice to everyone. EVERYONE.

I honestly don’t know how anyone tolerated me.  If my memory is correct, I must have been insufferable.

I don’t know who told me that I was right about everything, but I most certainly thought that I was!  I look back now on those years and laugh.  I’m glad I can laugh.

Turns out, I was only right about some things.

I was right that I was good at writing. I was right that I have a good ear for music.

I was right in thinking that everyone should be loving and compassionate to each other, animals, plants, nature, and the planet itself.  I was right that we have a responsibility to do so.

I was right that love is a verb. It is not a stagnant state, one that simply exists. It is something we choose to embrace and act upon.

I was right thinking that the most important people in the world are the ones who choose, through blood or choice, to love us, to have our back, always, even when they know we are wrong.

This last is especially true.

About almost everything else, I was wrong.

That’s why I find it interesting when people younger than me automatically assume I have answers to life, the universe, and everything. They actually listen to me as if what I am saying carries weight.

I do have answers. I have always had answers.

I’m just not sure that they are right answers; and if they are indeed right, I don’t know if they will be right tomorrow.

It’s kind of an awkward thing to admit.

I mean, I am a doctor, by profession and training.

My specialties are chiropractic and natural longevity. I have a lot of schooling, training, and clinical experience to back up my opinions, and I try to keep on top of current science and research so that I can best serve my clients and patients.

I often find that what science believed was correct twenty years ago changes too.

Twenty years ago, we thought that genes determined our destiny. Now we know that the proteins that surround our genes determine the expression of the genes, and that we must protect the health of the proteins, as well as the genes, so that we can express ourselves properly.

That one statement is huge. It is also so new that there are still doctors alive who don’t know it.  But science knows it, and now you know it.

Fifteen years ago, we thought that the nervous system communicated only via its axons and dendrites. Now we know that harmonic resonance and electromagnetic waves can cause whole cities of nerves to fire simultaneously, instantaneously.

Huge.

Just two years ago, we thought that the only cleansing mechanism in the brain was cerebral spinal fluid. Now we know that the brain has lymphatic drainage, like the rest of the body. That may not sound like a big deal to you, but anatomy books the world over have to change, and doctors have to take this into account when addressing brain health.

In short, these are all game changers. They have changed the way science is approaching not only health care, but how we develop technology, bioengineering, chemistry…everything.

And those are only a few of the things that have changed since I was a teenager, even since I was a doctoral student.

There is something else that I think is true, but I haven’t told you yet.

Ready?

Here it is.

There is an intelligence that informs the structure and function of all physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual expression. It informs the structure of all consciousness itself, in all its forms. It is, in fact, universal, and each manifestation of the universal expresses a face of that consciousness. That consciousness also includes, but is not limited to, the universe itself.

Big words, right?

Science can’t prove that one yet. But faith and philosophy systems have been intuiting this truth at least since we figured out how the tides work, and how to light fire.

I’m willing to bet that’s true.

Chiropractic thinks it’s true.  That’s a big part of the reason I am a chiropractor.

I am also willing to bet that your body knows a lot more than any book written on the human body. Your body has a wisdom that lends itself toward life and the exploration of consciousness, and it wants to express itself through health as much as a plant in spring wants to grow toward the sun.

I think we have a responsibility to care for our bodies as much as we care for the ones we love. That we need to have our own backs, even when we make mistakes.

When we love ourselves enough to care for ourselves, we love life itself. We love the universal intelligence in us all.

Just something to think about.

I think about it every day.

By the way: the only reason I am sharing this, and everything I do, is because I love you.

Truly.

I want us to grow old together.  I want us to get smarter and wiser every day, without losing our sense of wonder.

I want us to be okay with knowing that we are going to learn new things as we go; and to know that the power of love never changes.

Let’s grow old well.  Together.

— Claire

 

5 Self-Improvement Tasks that Make Your Life Worse

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We’re getting on that time of year when we begin thinking about self-improvement for 2017, and with good reason.

It’s the things that we do every day that have the most impact on our lives.  By making little life tweaks, we can dramatically improve our health and our state of mind. You know that, or you wouldn’t be trying to improve your life by changing your habits.

Conversely, little life tweaks can dramatically screw us up, too.

Here are 5 things you may be doing to improve your life that make your life worse:

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Get Rid of These Fats!

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Fats. It is almost upon us, peoples…the tide is turning and we’re heading into winter before you can say “who drank all the pumpkin spice lattes?” As we age, it’s important to give our skin proper nourishment to survive cold, dry air that winter winds deliver. Luckily, we can start with something we all like to do.

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