Imagine having major dental surgery and being told by your dentist, “Sorry, the only thing I can give you is an OTC Tylenol. The Tylenol won’t really do much and taking too much of it can really “f” up your liver. Some oxycodone would relieve your pain over the next 24 hours but I’m not allowed to give it to you.”
FWIW about 8 years ago I had an abscessed tooth. The pain was so bad plus I had facial swelling and a high fever and that it happened late on a Saturday when I couldn’t get an appointment for an oral surgeon, I went to the ER out of desperation – the pain was that bad – like someone had put an axe blade through my jaw, down my neck and up through the top of my head.
The ER doc proscribed a strong antibiotic and about 4 hydrocodone pills to get me over until I could see an oral surgeon. I spent most of that Monday morning calling around until I finally found one who would see me that next morning. He had to remove the tooth, it couldn’t be saved but thank Godz he did for the pain finally stopped. I already had the antibiotics from the ER doc so didn’t need another script for that but the dentist gave me a script for another 6 hydrocodone pills – 3 of which I took over the next 2 days, the other 3 I flushed after determining I didn’t need them anymore. But the ones I took, they were greatly appreciated.
Or after back surgery, abdominal surgery, a C-section, etc. – “Here’s a Motrin. Suck it up and tough it out.”
I have disk compression at L5 and L6 and S4 and S5 and I have a bit of a spinal curvature and a tilted pelvis and therefore suffer from some serious back pain issues from time to time.
It is also muscular – I tend to have very tight calve and hamstring muscles and need to do intensive daily stretches every morning and every night to prevent problems from flaring up – but when my back does flair up, the muscles tighten and puts pressure on the bulged disks which cause neve pain which cause the muscles to tighten even more and causes more nerve pain ….. so on and so on until I get nerve pain and back muscle spasms so bad that I can stand up straight at all or even walk.
Imagine having a severe charley horse that not only in your calf muscle but one that also goes all the up to the middle of your back and down your side and across your ribs and then all the way down to your toes every time your try to move. And then there is also the nerve pain that radiates from the lower back and then down the legs and the muscle tightness and soreness that even effects my shoulders and neck and upper and lower arms and makes just about every part of my body hurt.
If I do my due diligence - do my exercises and stretches faithfully every morning and every night and in between whenever I can, if I keep my weight down, eat healthy and go to the gym and work out at home to do some weight barring exercises, I can usually keep the really bad back flair ups at bay. Usually. But not always. When I do get a really bad episode of back nerve and muscle pain and spasms - thank God and my doctor for a day or two of an opioid like Percocet and some muscle relaxers.
Let us also consider your 80-year-old granny who has severe arthritis and osteoporosis, perhaps fibromyalgia and who underwent or needs to undergo knee and hip replacement? Let’s just tell her to suck it up lest she become a wild eyed drug addict.
Or sadly of all, consider the stage 4 terminal cancer patient being told “Sorry, you can’t have the painkiller that would alleviate your suffering because you might get addicted during these last few weeks of your life. Or we could give you an opioid but only after a 20-page document is submitted to the DEA and we wait a year or more to hear back from them, if ever, and then after you have an interview with an addictions counselor and then assuming your insurance company even approves the $800 per pill price increase. Of course you will not likely live long enough to get approved anyway. Do you know your local liquor store has a sale on Jack Daniels?”
As for drug addicts, if you dry up the opioid supply, addicts seeking a high will do what addicts do - they will just find another drug to abuse or another avenue to find it, find another source of drugs to get high on. In other words, drug addicts will always find a way. Meanwhile people with legitimate need for pain relief will be made to prove they are not addicts or will be made to suffer needlessly and addicts will keep finding ways to get high.
Of course there is a very real problem with opioid abuse and while I have some ideas, I don’t have all the answers. But making pre-criminals out of the people who legitimately need them and are not abusing them nor likely to ever abuse them and putting doctors under even bigger mountains of red tape and preventing them from doing what is best for their patients, is not the answer either.
Terrific post! Making people who have chronic health issues suffer when there is relief available is institutionalized torture. Yes addicts die, and coincidentally more die whenever we have assets in Afghanistan and the opium yield rises, but why do “conservative” drug warriors throw out logic, reason and compassion?
The war on drugs claims more lives than drugs themselves, and the decades of government intervention (so like the war on poverty) has only exacerbated the problem while riding roughshod over the Constitution.
Drugs are one of the worst scourges on mankind; however, let’s remember nothing has killed and enslaved more people than unbridled governments.