Treating addiction and pain

continued

“It was like a sumo wrestler was sitting on my chest,” says the forty-three-year-old Ann Arborite. “That’s what it felt like to breathe. I could never get enough air, and every bone and muscle in my body ached.” She saw an assortment of doctors, took seventy prescribed pills daily, and slept for twenty hours at a stretch.

Hopeless and suicidal, Samantha was beginning to think that all was lost.

Until she was sent to Dr. Herbert ­Malinoff.

Although not a psychiatrist, “he listened to me more than any psychiatrist ever had,” she says. He learned about her traumatic childhood and made connections between her physical and emotional pain. Seeing Samantha weekly at first, he removed her from many medications and got her involved in a chronic pain relief program. Seven years later, Samantha is working on a master’s degree and describes herself as “ninety-five percent recovered.”