Welcome to Wellness Unmas. I'm Dr. Nicole Sapphire. Today we are diving into a conversation that intersects two national health emergencies, the opioid epidemic, and chronic pain. In 2024, over 80,000 Americans lost their lives to drug overdoses. Now, this is a 27% decline from the previous year, and that's the steepest drop

that we've seen in decades. This is absolutely encouraging, but we still have a long ways to go.

Overdose remains a leading cause of death in adults among those aged 18 to 44.

Now, but I don't want to get into the weeds of the opioid epidemic right now because that is its own episode in itself.

And to be honest, it is more than just one episode.

We have to talk about the history of it, where we are now and the future of it.

We're not doing that today.

Here's what we're doing today.

What's often left out of the conversation is the fact that more than 50 million Americans,

roughly one in five adults, are living with chronic pain.

And of those, nearly 17 million are experiencing high-impact chronic pain that actually

limits their daily lives.

Now, this is not just a personal burden.

It's actually a national crisis.

I wrote about it in my first book, Make America Healthy Again, which came out in 2020.

Chronic pain costs the U.S. economy an estimated $560 to $635 billion a year. Now, this is direct medical expenses, but it's also from lost productivity, more than the combined costs of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. Yet we rarely hear people talking about

chronic pain. And I guarantee people listening to this podcast, there are some of you who are

dealing with it. I'm dealing with it. I've talked to you about the fact

that I suffer from an autoimmune disease and I do everything I possibly can to fight that

inflammation, whether it's taking my biological injections to living a clean lifestyle, to exercising

and doing other things that are targeted for decreasing inflammation.

What some of you may not know about me is deep during COVID, December 2020, I also fell down

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