Why did this pop up all of a sudden? What did we do 30 years ago? What changed in pain management where people drift to heroin to deal with it?
The people overdosing aren’t all in so much pain that options are the only option. We had a gal where I used to work who had a prescription for oxy, but sold it on the street. She had “ unmanageable pain”, and we had to let her fail drug test after test, while she bought heroin and sold oxy. It ended when she crashed.
>>Why did this pop up all of a sudden? What did we do 30 years ago? What changed in pain management where people drift to heroin to deal with it?
People expect to run at full speed like a 25 year old until they die at age 90. Employers demand that you never slow down and workers rarely get promoted into supervision like they used to.
The pain was always there, but people got old and slow and died much younger as the excesses of youth caught up with them.
The first big change was Oxicontin, and opioid painkiller marketed to doctors as non-addictive, which was a full fledged lie, started being prescribed as the wonder painkiller, and addicted a generation. Meanwhile we keep moving more and more to a relationship with medicine that boils down to: give me a scrip and stop bothering me. Chronic back pain is one of the big ones, lots of people have it, the best cure is get more exercise and drop some pounds, everybody wants a drug or an operation, maybe both. Operations have over a 2/3 failure rate, and the drug will eventually ramp up to an opioid and the person will become an addict.
We’re pushing doctors away from lifestyle prescriptions. No more do you hear “stiffen your bed and drop 20 pounds and let’s see”. We’re addicted to the pills before we even hit the doctor because we don’t accept the “old” answers to a lot of these chronic pain problems, just give us some pills so we can move on. Of course on the other side the doctors through around these scrips like there’s nothing wrong. Get dental surgery? Here’s a scrip for vicodin (also an opioid). Even when we don’t demand pills the doctors assume we will and give them to us instead of just telling us to use an icepack until the swelling goes down.