There is a problem with our healthcare system in the way doctors manage a patient's pain today, particularly endemic in the United States, and that problem is prescribing opioid painkillers. For those who don't know, opioids are a class of drugs derived from the poppy plant, the same plant used to make heroin, and the pharmaceutical company's morphine, codeine, vicodin, and oxycodone. All opioids bind to pain-receiving neurons in the brain called opioid receptors that stop pain directly at the neural level. This is needed in hospitals when used for painful procedures that cannot be done without anesthesia, but over-the-counter prescription of what is essentially heroin in the form of oxycodone, vicodin and codeine for daily use to treat pain of massive quantities of people has started an epidemic of use and addiction here in the United States. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) “healthcare providers wrote 259 million prescriptions for opioid painkillers in 2012” this number is staggering when viewed in terms of consistent annual use by millions of Americans, and this is not an isolated trend of increasing prescriptions, as illustrated by this statistic from the book Popping pills, a drug abuse epidemic, which found that two years earlier, in 2010, they had produced “enough painkillers to sedate every adult American with doses every four hours for a month." This means that people in America who turn to doctors for pain relief are in most cases not given other, lighter pain medications or treated to the damaged area, but are instead sent home with heroin. This does two things as it masks the pain instead of addressing the body's problems and, in most cases, at the cost of depending on the doctor... middle of paper... they do not understand the pain content of the lesson, after all children can convey real emotions to those lessons you have given and then properly heal the wounds, just as we should do with our own instead of drowning them and everyone else in the same sea, so many drug addicts who we look at with pity or disgust have fallen . This pain is initially negative, but a life insensitive to it is a life not lived; it is inexorably part of us, it teaches us and gives us awareness of our needs and what surrounds us. We no longer need to run away and mask our feelings of pain, we can choose to make ourselves truly whole again. We need to move from these drugs to other treatment methods, because the alternative is to take everything away from them, and to endure someone's pain is the death of a fundamental part of them, anyone who has seen their victims knows this is true.