Dr Rick Sponaugle, Medical Director of Florida Detox & Wellness Institute, applauds Governor Rick Scott, Attorney General Pam Bondi and our own local State Senator Mike Fasano for their efforts in passing the “pill mill” legislation.
Doctors throughout America, including Dr. Phil, have referred patients suffering from OxyContin addiction to Florida Detox for Dr. Sponaugle’s scientific addiction treatment that stops drug and alcohol craving by balancing brain chemistry. Traditional rehab centers use “talk therapy” in their attempt to coach patients through each day of drug craving.
As a Florida physician, it has been embarrassing for Dr. Sponaugle to learn that his patients from Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta and even Toronto had been riding the “Oxy Express” all the way to Florida just so they could buy their “Oxys and Roxys” from unscrupulous drug dealing doctors in Tampa Bay.
Parents throughout America will applaud the crackdown on drug dealing doctors in Florida. Out of state parents often rush their sons/daughters into Dr. Sponaugle’s rehab center stating, “my nephew back in Philly overdosed Saturday night, he and my son were snorting OxyContin they bought right here in Tampa, they were supposedly coming down for the beaches.”
The Prescription Drug Monitoring Program is not perfect, but it will enable Attorney General Pam Bondi to focus on illegitimate “pain specialists“ and the pain clinics whose doctors routinely prescribe opiate pain pills to out of state residents. Common sense dictates that patients with legitimate pain do not need to travel out of state, bypassing several other states to procure opioid pain medicine in Florida.
Furthermore, the exponential increase in physician prescribing of opiate pain medicines since 1990 is not warranted. True pain specialists, not simply the doctor who hangs a pain shingle outside of his office, but, those who actually matriculate in specialty training for pain management as Dr. Sponaugle did at the University of Florida, are taught to use every means possible to avoid prescribing addicting opiate medications.
Medical doctors have known for ten years that patients who take opiate pain medication on a chronic [daily] basis, will within a couple of years, suffer more physical pain from their injury than they experienced immediately following their accident. This well documented phenomenon is called hyperalgesia.
University pain professors suggest we know little regarding the mechanism of hyperalgesia, this void in knowledge is derived from the fact that America’s rehab centers have failed to perform any sophisticated testing on patients with OxyContin addiction.
Dr. Sponaugle’s research at Florida Detox has proven that daily consumption of Oxycontin changes the addicted brain in a manner that up regulates electrifying brain chemicals and down regulates relaxing brain chemicals, thus, Oxycontin induced up regulated brian “voltage” amplifies incoming electrical pain signals after they reach the brain. The 3/10 sciatica pain is amplified to a 7/10.
For this reason, chronic pain patients must constantly raise their dose of Oxycontin, Dr. Sponaugle treats many patients who suffer an OxyContin addictions of 3,000 mgs a day, they were initially prescribed only 30 mgs a day.
Furthermore, SPECT brain research on Dr. Sponaugle’s addicted patients in addition to research from university medical centers has proven that patients suffering high dose Methadone and OxyContin addiction can have much worse looking brain scans than patients abusing street drugs.
