Saturday, June 18, 2016
BOARDMAN
For many patients living with chronic pain, daily doses of pain medication are measured in tens of milligrams.
When Troy Mazur, 47, of Warren, visited local pain- management physician Dr. Shawn Donatelli and chiropractor Dr. Michael Lyons last year, Mazur’s daily morphine-equivalent dose was a whopping 600 mg.
After numerous surgeries to repair multiple hernias, Mazur was living with both the chronic pain that stemmed from a 17-year-old injury, and the crippling side effects of opioid addiction.
For much of the previous decade, Mazur’s circumstances had robbed him of the will to live. Unable to walk, incapacitated by his excruciating pain, Mazur rarely left his house. He lost his teeth, has a persistent ringing in his ears, and battled severe depression as a result of the drugs.
“I was ready to die,” he said. “I was ready to give up.”
To see Mazur today is to see an entirely different person.
He walks his dogs. He goes fishing. He smiles.
And, he does all of that while taking a mere fraction of the pain medication – about three percent – that he used to take.
Mazur credits his progress to the work of Lyons and Donatelli.
The three recently were featured in an Ohio State Chiropractic Association documentary titled “A Different Approach to the Opioid Epidemic,” which notes that 23 people die each week in Ohio as a result of heroin or opioid pain medication.
The video chronicles Mazur’s journey, from the injury he sustained in 1988 at a landscaping job, to his progress thanks to a coordinated, multidisciplinary effort that his doctors say can help other patients in his position.
“Too many people, especially chronic pain patients, just sit at home. They think, ‘This is it,’” Dr. Lyons said in the video.
“It’s all about working together, and having the right people to dictate and manage the care that is going to be the most beneficial.”
In Mazur’s case, Drs. Lyons and Donatelli combined chiropractic care, physical therapy, pain management, and more.
“I think the keys to success here can be applied to the bigger picture, and that is: very rarely does a person who has a chronic pain syndrome find a solution that comes in any one form,” Dr. Donatelli said in the video.
“The real key is sitting down with a patient; listening to that patient; examining that patient; figuring out what the problem is ... and putting together the whole package, so that at the end of the day, that patient – like Troy – can walk away as a success story and say, ‘Hey look at me. Look at how much better I’m doing compared to where I was six months ago, nine months ago, 10 years ago.”
In an interview at his Boardman office, Dr. Lyons expressed frustration with what he views as a tendency on the part of some doctors to overprescribe pain medication, which contributes to the national opioid-addiction epidemic that claims, on average, 129 lives per day, and which fails to treat the problems at the root of patients’ pain.
“There are a lot of things people can do outside of taking pain medication,” he said.
“It’s not that I don’t believe in drugs. Drugs have a place. ... But if you’re taking medications longer than two weeks for pain, you’ve got to find something else.”
For his part, Mazur has found comfort in accepting that he will always live with some amount of pain.
“If you ask the doctor how far I am from where I was to where I am now, it’s night and day. Now I can walk my dogs. I go out to the store,” he said in the documentary.
“I wouldn’t go to the store [before] because I didn’t want to walk around. It hurt too bad. At least now I know I’m going to have pain the rest of my life, but it’s at a manageable level where I can go out and do things.”