Unless you've been there, you have no idea what soul shattering chronic pain is like. 85% of overdose deaths are from elicit drugs. What is the DEA is doing about the Fentanyl entering from China? Nothing.
I really feel for chronic pain patients, having suffered from chronic (however not as severe) back pain myself for many years.
However, the propensity of American doctors to prescribe heavy-duty opiods is unheard of in pretty much the rest of the world. My cousin lives in the the U.S. and has top notch health insurance. After an accident and the subsequent surgery on her leg, she was certainly in pain but as European she was completely flabbergasted that she was offered Oxi for that. She vehemently declined and basically got by with 800mg of Ibuprofen per day for two weeks.
In Europe, doctors go for opiods outside the hospital setting if and only if all other options have been completely exhausted (incl. expecting the patient to tolerate some amount of pain for a limited period of time). I think the doctine in the American health care system that patients have to be completely free of pain at all times does much more harm than good.
Eventually your addiction becomes so big no physician would risk the license to continue prescribing you drugs. Then you hit the streets which often leads to completely diminished life best case and death worst. There is no solution to people “building a better mousetrap.”
No idea what you’re talking about. I know several people on doses that worked & hadn’t been changed/increased in a decade that have had their scripts ripped from them. Some killed themselves, others stuck around & spend every day in suicidal misery for their young children.
My niece had her tonsils removed a few years back, she’s 15 now. She was prescribed 80 oxytocin. Her dad is a doc and had a fit, confronted the prescribing doc. I have similar stories but that was the biggest subscription. I broke my hip a few years and this was as much of a concern than the surgery. Sucks to find yourself in the path of whatever is driving this.
Of note: This hits somewhat close to home for me as I’ve suffered from lower back pain - from the age of 11 (or a bit earlier, amnesia’s a bitch) - that I can now say was & still is more painful than when I fully shattered my wrist (~21 y/o) in a gnarly accident. Also much worse than the aches & pains associated with getting hit by a car as a pedestrian (eh, PEV user more accurate) twice now.
Shoulder & neck pain near the same since ~13, & pelvic/hip pain roughly ~75% as bad, & but also just indescribably & unfathomably uncomfortable.
It’s so bad that when I’d very obviously shattered my wrist, I calmly walked into my backwoods emergency room simply to get an X-ray & nothing more so I could quickly get to a surgeon in a larger city. They told me I’d be screaming, that there was no way my wrist was broken, & I was only seeking drugs. After I made them pull up my medical history from Mayo Clinic & Harvards’ medical teaching school (Mass Gen. Hospital - apologies if I’m accrediting that incorrectly) they begrudgingly gave me an X-ray. Whatever radiology tech that was working the backwoods at 3am said there were no fractures, despite them being clearly visible on the monitor. They called it a sprain & offered me Tramadol for pain in the end, hoping it would make this drug seeker go away with his small bounty. I ripped up the script & told them to fuck off.
Luckily, I had insurance that made it so I could schedule w/a surgeon in my network online, & luckily, a highly rated hand surgeon had a near next day opening. He immediately saw two broken bones on the X-ray, & another bad spot he wasn’t 100% on. Ordered a CT scan, found 3 badly broken bones (scaphoid, most importantly), & told me I’d have likely permanently lost use of that hand in a week or two w/o surgery. Got me an emergency scheduling, & I came out w/5 screws. He himself was curious about my lack of screaming in pain once he saw the CT results - I told him about the condition affecting my shoulders & neck, neurogenic Thoracic Outlet Syndrome, & he seemed to immediately understand, though I was his first patient he’d personally seen with the condition.
But, I digress my ramblings.
Unmanaged chronic pain, even when the pain level isn’t particularly high - just constant, for weeks/months on end - will rob you of everything you managed to be capable of in life.
In my case, I went from acing my differential equations, thermodynamics, & fluid dynamics engineering classes, to name a few - to barely being able to do basic trigonometry on my best days. My nearly perfect grammar & writing skills (scored highest percentile in reading/writing on ACT & SAT, for whatever that’s worth. Also placed as a finalist in state spelling bee) are now complete dogshit - as can be seen in my HN comments - & I don’t feel as if I can articulate my thoughts better than a middle schooler at this point. Some of my engineering professors actually asked me why I didn’t go into something English/writing related, as my scores weren’t as high in math/science.
Despite a letter from Mass Generals Chief of Thoracic Outlet Syndrome program, essentially begging a surgeon in my state to refer me to proper pain management as my surgery kept getting cancelled (coronavirus shit), & that surgeon in my state promising me twice he would get me pain management - while looking me in the eyes - I showed up to a pain management appt, all documentation in hand, & was essentially laughed out of the office as a very particular type of young white male drug seeker. I do not believe I’d met a larger egoistical psychopath in my life at that point. Sociopaths/Psychopaths in medicine seem to be drawn to pain management positions. Well, I’m pulling that out of my ass - but support group anecdata seems to support the notion.
Anyways. If you are in severe pain that derails your entire full ride scholarship university education & your career. Even then. The US medical system does not give the slightest fuck about you. You are nothing more than a lazy drug seeker that wants to spend life on welfare in your drug induced euphoria. You will die if you don’t have the support/money to pursue other options. While I won’t get more into it - Mexico, of all places, is much more humane than the US when it comes to pain mgmt.
Final note: the opiates - I think Roxycodone 10mg - that the surgeon made me promise to take, as it would promote better healing of my wrist - was the first thing in my entire life, & at that point a decade of pure unadulterated suffering, to actually help my lower back pain. The first of 7 pills induced mild euphoria for the first ~15 minutes. No euphoria after that, only the strange sense of “holy shit I’m lying in bed & my back hasn’t hurt in 3 days”
The US medical system likely decided the fate of an otherwise fairly promising life long ago, & that fate is a death of despair.
Sorry for the text wall, didn’t plan on being so butthurt over this article.
Thanks for sharing this. It sucks and my heart is with you. Have had simular experiences, albeit shortlived so hard to imagine how this feels on a longer time scale.
A sort of naive question. It shouldn’t be very hard to get this medication on black market. Is it a matter of access or a matter of cost?
In some ways, I’m calmly waiting for the murders that come with this.
And no, no guns need to be involved. Just one more appointment, knowing they’ll be laughed out of the office again, and… anything deadly. Blades. Sharp pencils. Screwdrivers. Maybe someone will even get creative, but then - before they die by suicide or cop or whatever - the cynical, lying, piece of shit, psychopathic asshole goes with them in an entirely unscripted, brutally violent moment of fury initiated without any warning.
They’ll write it off at first, but the Internet is the Internet and after a few pain “doctors” who are violating their oaths get made permanently redundant notice will duly be taken, and maybe some even larger psychopathic asshole in a bureaucracy somewhere will decide that their name could end up on someone’s list. And you can’t go through life with that amount of security, and enjoy life, nor have a moment’s peace-nor can you afford it, except maybe at Zuck’s level. Certainly not on what an MD makes.
Sorry these people died. But the fight goes on. When the time comes, I'll help in what way I can to fabricate scientific studies that say that fentanyl helps with cancer remission or depression. This is one of the few ways to make it palatable enough for the public to make legal. Pain is insufficient to convince them, but disease often is.
It worked with weed. It worked in some places for shrooms. And it worked for ketamine. With a little bit of faked data, I think we can make it work for more things.
> Sorry these people died. But the fight goes on. When the time comes, I'll help in what way I can to fabricate scientific studies that say that fentanyl helps with cancer remission or depression. This is one of the few ways to make it palatable enough for the public to make legal. Pain is insufficient to convince them, but disease often is.
> It worked with weed. It worked in some places for shrooms. And it worked for ketamine. With a little bit of faked data, I think we can make it work for more things.
Are you out of your mind?
And you have no idea how many lives are being destroyed by easy access to weed. Teens unable to function day-to-day unless they've had some. They only thing they care about is when can they have some more, they schedule their entire lives around it. (I'm aware it's not physically addicting, but it is psychologically addicting.)
I really don't understand what you think you are accomplishing with this.
Why are these teens living the sort of lives where being stoned all the time is the only way to function? A desire to be "stoned out" like you're describing, is frequently related (like any sort of escapist behaviour) with the life situation of the person seeking escape. Are they under psychological pressures that are driving them to seek escape? Just look at the massive rise in teen suicide, perhaps they are self-medicating rather than committing suicide?
Are you tracking any of these teens as they become adults to correlate teenage weed use with adult weed use, the majority of teenage behaviours settle out as people mature and find a place to fit into life, with teenage life provided certain shelter from adult life pressure such as rent and food costs, the need to get a job often leads to people "turning their life around" (which can be viewed as classic goal oriented behaviour, I wanted X so i did what I had to do to get X)
If you're going to claim that people have no idea how many lives are being destroyed by easy access to weed. I'm going to need you to cite something, heck even something as vague as "we see this kind of damage, but can't quantify how many teenagers are affected and need more follow up funding" would be a good start.
> I really don't understand what you think you are accomplishing with this.
Freedom for people to live their life and treat their body with full agency without the government interfering. My body, my choice.
Playing along didn't work because anti-freedom people are zealots who will never let individuals help themselves. Given that, we must all work with the openings we are provided. So depression and anxiety it is. And since anything formatted appropriately works if published, I'll make sure it's formatted correctly and published.
