How did pain management post-surgery change my mind on opioids, and the addiction crisis?

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This video includes questions
- What was the reason I gave my ten-year-old son, why did he have the surgery?
- How did I approach the dilemma of using Opioids for my son's pain management?

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:00:04] This is Dr. Chalmers. Welcome to Wellness Insights with me. Dr. Chalmers.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:00:07] How did it affect my son's pain management? A lot. I mean, this is more, and I have all the pictures. If you knew me, you wanted to throw up, but I had to take pictures of it while they were doing it. They did chip the bone off of his plate because of the bone and sort of growing over it. So imagine that they decided this long prior. It opens. They can get to the they can get inside, and they can start working on the actual bones.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:00:23] And they had to take a chisel and literally like chip away at the bone that's in there before they can even unscrew the screws. When it was done. So you can see the incision, and you can see the bone, and there are holes, there are six holes in the back, like not like small holes, like big old holes where those screws used to be all the way through. And so then they put it back together.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:00:47] What happened the first time that he had the surgery when they put him in is that he had a reaction to the dissolvable strips, sorry, the dissolvable sutures they used. And so it had opened up. We had this wound issue to him; he had this giant scar. It was like three-quarters of an inch this way by the entire six-inch length of the scar. So what they did was they did a scar revision where they just cut off that scab. So he had to have the bone chipped away. He had six giant holes in the actual bone.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:01:22] Maybe six inches cut out and then sewn back together. That's that's what the surgery was. So I really understand this was not like pulling a splinter out. This was a major actual surgery, A to a ten-year-old. And then what we ended up doing was we just cut little strips, and I gave him little strips, and he was fine whenever he would be like, Hey, Dad, my arm starting to hurt, I would give him a little strip, and he put it under his tongue. It would dissolve, and he'd be fine. Ten or 15 minutes later, I'd be like, Hey, how's your arm? He's like, Oh, it's fine. And he would go back to reading, and I was making sure that he wasn't getting high because I wanted to make sure the dose was right.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:01:32] And I would talk to him and stuff like that, and he his normal silly self in anything, nothing I would consider that was an added bonus. No, no, no high issues. So it worked out really, really well. What observations do I make about the son's experience with sublingual strips in terms of psychological effects. This is how I knew that I'd use them on me, and I'd use them on my friends and use them on everybody else. But when I gave them to my son for his issues, that's really when I knew.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:02:16] I knew for a fact This is our replacement for opioids. This is it. My ten-year-old is not high. He's talking normally. He's reading his book. He's remembering everything he read. He has no pain. This is what we need to be doing. This is it. This is where we need to go. The observation was that we have our solution. I'm done looking. This is it.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:02:35] We need everybody to know we have a new national conversation about this. We need to be using these in everybody so that we don't have addiction issues. We don't have the death issues and can bring everybody back together. We can rebuild and stabilize our families. So 100%, it was super critical. It changed the way I think about it, too, 100%. I know now that this is the medication we should be using.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:02:43] So that's that was the observation I made, and that's what it changed. So, how do I react to the idea of having more comprehensive information about cannabis? 100%. We need 100%. We need more research. And we're trying right now to get our camera strips in for pain research in California. I'm pretty sure that seeing it knocked out. I will talk about that more than you guys want to hear. But because I, like I said, Ben, we've got it. We've got to got to give options other than opioids. You know, it's we have to. So we know we need all the information we can. I'd love PET scan function. I love long-term studies. You know, all of it like we need is.