You need to pay more attention to how people are talking, and the way they claim that doctors are too cavalier in "handing out" opioid prescriptions. I also have chronic pain. between Crohns disease, severe arthritis, and degenerative disk disease, I live with pain every day. I don't remember the time I slept for more that 3 hours uninterrupted. But I don't take my prescription for Vicodin unless I absolutely have to.
The government has already made it harder for me to get opioids I often need to be able to move without crying. I can't get a prescription for more than 30 days at a time. There's no such thing as a refill. I need to go the the pain specialist's office, taking time off of work and paying $60 for the office visit, in order to take the signed prescription from the doctor to the pharmacy.
My biggest fear is that in the name of the people who are killing themselves on addictive pain killers, the government is going to make it incredibly difficult for the people who live with chronic pain the drugs they need to make life more bearable.
Mark
That has been happening for a long time. It goes in waves. The answer, of course, as the answer to Obamacare, is to get the government the hell out of medicine and insurance. The only proper portion for the government in these fields is the Constitutional requirement for the government to guarantee weights and measures. Barring that, well, you get what you get. The government is riding on everyone.
Years ago there was a doctor here who had a gift, a talent beyond his training. He saved my life and wasn’t even my doctor. The hospital kept sending me home saying I was having hysterical episodes when I stopped breathing. Dr Williams looked at me and said I was bleeding to death and got MRI ordered and found my spleen was ruptured. He was never my doctor and I never got a bill from him. Two if his patients OD’d and died while the feds were doing a local investigation on opiate prescriptions. They immediately arrested him and tried him in federal court. He died in Federal prison. I went to his memorial service at his church, the locally biggest black church. I went to say what Dr Williams had done for me. I found myself in a long line of people, some from the upper reaches of local society, who came to talk about the good doctor. It was all the same story. “I couldn’t get relief and the doctors, mine and the ones in the hospital, couldn’t find out anything. Dr Williams came into the room and asked me how I was and looked at me and then at my chart - he wasn’t even scheduled to be there - and called in another doctor and told him what to do for me and he was right. If he hadn’t walked in I find I would have had perhaps months to live” It was different stories and different problems and circumstances but basically that was it. “He just looked at me and knew what it was.” Well those two patients who died had been getting street drugs, too, and that didn’t make a difference at his trial. He was an “example.”