Jack Osbourne, son of rock legend Ozzy and colon cancer survivor Sharon Osbourne, recently stated that he blames his alcohol and drug addiction on his father. During his mother Sharon's diagnosis and treatment for colon cancer, the young Jack used alcohol and the powerfully addictive prescription painkiller OxyContin as a way to cope.

Jack is quoted as saying, "My problems peaked when mom was sick and dad was dealing with his problems the same way as I was, by drinking, so I had no one to turn to. I was just hanging out with my crowd drinking and doing drugs." Jack ended up in an addiction rehab clinic to get clean and sober.

This is no way excuses the badly-decided choices that Jack made when he turned to alcohol and drugs as a way to cope with his feelings, but there is a sharp focus and more than a bit of snarkiness to the news reports concerning Jack's blaming comment that misses a great opportunity in regard to discussing the impact a parent's cancer diagnosis has on children.

As the American Cancer Society (ACS) states, "Families face many complex issues when one of their members has cancer. There will probably be a time during a family's experience with cancer when psychosocial support services will be helpful in meeting the emotional needs of the family. There are teams of experts, each with a different focus, who offer support and are trained in how cancer affects a family." ACS offers a terrific resource for the family with the online publication of Helping Children When A Family Member Has Cancer.

The Family Doctor states, "Every person has a different way of handling news that a loved one has cancer. Many people react with shock, disbelief and even anger when they're first given the news." The Family Doctor's Cancer: Helping Your Family Help You offers advice on different questions a parent might have, such as:

• How will my family react to the news that I have cancer?
• Should I tell my children that I have cancer?
• How do I tell my children that I have cancer?
• How can I help my children cope with their feelings?
  

In 2002, when I drove home after being told I had cancer, I wondered and worried about how I was going to tell my children, how I could avoid the unavoidable shattering of innocence in their world, how to protect them from their own fear and pain? I sat outside in the car, trying to stare through the walls of our home, knowing that in the next five minutes I would be changing our lives forever with the news of my cancer diagnosis. I wanted to freeze time, to save the innocence, to keep the awful news from being true.

In the ACS online resource for families, it states, "Parents can have a powerful effect on how their children react to a crisis in the family. In the beginning this responsibility can feel like a huge weight, but it is possible for family members to learn how to deal with and even grow through the experience of having cancer in the family."

Support services can include individual counseling, family counseling, and support groups. If you do not know where to start, ask your physician or call the local hospital or local ACS office. Someone will be able to help you help your children, and all family members, navigate through the crisis of cancer, so that everyone becomes a survivor of cancer in the best way possible.

It is said that 79-year-old Leonard Kulisek had not suffered any major illness in the years before his unfortunate death, except he did have a prescription for his gout. The Walgreens pharmacist who filled Kulisek's prescription was working under the influence of OxyContin and hydrocodone. Instead of gout medicine, the bottle was filled with insulin pills. The next day, Kulisek slipped into a coma, and for the next 22 months suffered a series of health issues before he died.

The pharmacist admitted to being addicted to painkillers for eight years, and had stolen over 86,000 pills from the pharmacy where he worked. The jurors held Walgreens responsible for failing to catch the drug thefts or notice that the pharmacist had an addiction problem. Walgreens must pay $31 million dollars to the Kulisek family. Walgreens plans an appeal.

Medication errors can occur for a number of reasons. What can you do to avoid medication errors? According to Rx for Safety, the most common reasons that errors happen are:

• Incomplete information about a patient.
• Incomplete information about a medication, such as warnings or side effects.
• Poor communication regarding a prescription such as illegible handwriting, confusion between similar drug names, misuse of zeroes or decimal points or inappropriate abbreviations.
• Lack of appropriate labeling on the drug container or pharmacy shelf.

Before you leave the doctor's office, look at the written prescription. Can you read the handwriting? If you cannot, the pharmacist might have a problem reading it accurately. When you have your prescription filled, ask the pharmacist to answer any questions you might have regarding the medication. Check to make sure that printed literature is included with the prescription detailing information about side effects and proper dosages. On the side of the prescription bottle is a label that describes what the pill looks like. Check to make sure the description of the pill matches the pills inside the bottle.

For more information on additional safeguards, read Avoiding Medical Errors at RX for Safety.

For chronic pain sufferers, this might be the earliest beginning of the ultimate end for unrelenting pain. Columbia University researchers have been studying how pain works at the molecular and cellular level and discovered a key enzyme that cause nerve cells to send pain messages through the central nervous system even when there is no physical pain being experienced. So although you might not actually be in physical pain any longer, if your brain is being told there is still pain, you will experience the reality of pain.

Because of this find, researchers are hoping a drug can be developed that will shut down the messengers and the message.

Researcher Richard Ambron is quoted as saying that pain is not necessary. I could not agree more and have been an advocate for quality of life issues for long-term cancer survivors who must endure chronic pain without effective relief.

Just like Ambron, I do not think it is necessary that people put up with or suffer silently in pain either, and because the current methods of treatment can lead to additional health problems, this type of research is most welcome -- and long past due.