Drug Testing and Toxicology: Redefining the Plague of Darkness.
The book of Exodus recounts the experience of the plague of darkness during Pharaoh's rule. The narrative discusses the imposing nature of the Darkness that occurred throughout the land of Egypt as a "darkness which may be felt. a thick darkness, where no one could see another person, and no one could rise from his place." What's old is new again. Although the narrative is thought to have occurred over three thousand years ago, modern day reports of increasing pain and treatment over the last two decades may offer another insight into this experience. As the plague imposed a sense of complete and utter isolationism where one afflicted could not interact with another nor shed the enveloping sense of imprisonment, so too can the pain experience impose similar overtones. Pain is becoming a pervasive state of being. It has garnered its own cadre of diagnostic codes, given rise to multiple treatment modalities, pain specialties and subspecialties, devices, and since 2005 has recruited September to be its own awareness month. Pain can be likened to darkness. Numerous books, publications, and narratives have described the experience of pain as fostering intense isolationism, hopelessness, worthlessness, despondency, nonacceptance, lack of productivity, familial discord, social outcast state, and other intimations of a lone and dark existence. In addition, the social and physical relationships of pain are thought to share underlying biological processes. Over the past two decades, the number of people suffering from some manner of pain, and the narcotic prescriptions that are tethered to pain symptoms, has increased fourto tenfold depending on how data are collected and/or stratified and can account for over 80% of physician visits. Many of these initial acute pain experiences progress to chronic pain conditions, which afflicts patients for years. Recent data estimate that as many as one in three individuals suffer from some manner of pain; over
Clinics in laboratory medicine