Narcotic prescriptions on the rise with adolescents

Headaches are a part of life, right? Wrong, and you shouldn't be spending your days with a bottle of aspirin glued to your hand. When a headache strikes, you may run through your usual routine: Turn out the lights, lie down and pop a pill. What do you do when your child has one? Do you tell them to do the same? Are they trained to just pop an aspirin to dull the pain?

If you haven’t noticed, there has been a significant increase in the number of children receiving narcotic prescriptions for their headaches. This causes and should cause great concern about the negative repercussions of this trend. After all, these types of medications come with some serious side effects and consequences but are routinely being prescribed to adolescents who aren’t always able to make educated, rational decisions regarding their usage.

One particular study took over 8,000 adolescent participants between the ages of 13 and 17, who wanted to seek medical treatment for their headaches. What the study found was alarming and not necessarily what one would expect. Approximately 46% of the participants who suffered with headaches and sought medical relief received a prescription for some type of opioid, which could be anything from hydrocodone to morphine to oxycodone, or any other narcotic.

The Repercussions 

Pain killers such as these that are being prescribed to these adolescents can affect the digestive system by causing constipation, nausea, and vomiting. Behaviorally, opiods tend to make one extremely drowsy, which isn’t going to help a child who is expected to do well in school or a kid that just got his or her driver’s license and is driving their family car. In addition, a large number of adolescents experiment with alcohol, which can be dire or even deadly, when combined with opioid usage. Children who are on anti-depressants or take sleeping pills face possible interactions as well.

Then there is the issue of tolerance aaddiction. Over time, more and more of the drug is necessary to get the same pain relief. It can lead to dependence on the drug, maybe even causing them to seek out other pain killers to feel even better, not unlike the growing numbers of adults with chronic pain addicted to narcotics. The past decade has witnessed a twofold increase in the number of opioid prescriptions, according to a study from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The Chiropractic Solution

Chiropractic care is a great alternative to curing headache pain as opposed to just masking it. It can ease everything from stress-related head pain to severe migraines, and it does so naturally and effectively, making it one of the best drug-free solutions for children and adolescents. So, the next time your child complaints of their head hurting call a chiropractor and see how they can be helped.