(How the opioid ‘crisis’ is creating hell for chronic pain sufferers)
This is my comment on https://www.painnewsnetwork.org/stories/2018/3/30/living-in-denial-and-the-overdose-crisis. (There ARE people who know what is going on and understand the wrong that is being perpetuated!)
June 19, 2018
This article puts the real problem into very plain words: A created ‘crisis’ that has dedicated all of its focus onto opioid deaths from overdose is wreaking havoc on people with chronic pain. What the creators of this vastly mis-directed effort forgot was the thousands upon thousands of people suffering from chronic pain who do not get relief from anything else, have tried them all, and have returned to an opioid of one type or another for one reason – the opioids work, and therefore some sort of ‘life’ is possible for these people.
I am one of them; I was going to a doctor who argued incessantly with me regarding pain relief until I walked out of her office in frustration this January, leaving myself without a GP for five long months. Without even meeting me, three family doctors refused to take me as a patient because of my pain and my use of Percocet for pain relief. One wanted to make me go to a methadone clinic, and another changed his mind an hour before I was to meet him.
However, I’m one of the lucky ones that could return to a specialist who has been my doctor on and off over the past thirty years. Even he tried to avoid the medication (Percocet) I was used to. I was willing to experiment and subsequently tried cannabis oil, Cymbalta, and varieties of acetaminophen., and then a new opioid called Supeudol, which did not relieve my pain, and instead made me incredibly dizzy and sleepy. My only reward was bad reactions and illness for eight hellish weeks.
This big-brother ‘threat’ treatment, which punishes practitioners who prescribe opioids, has been forced on doctors by the governments of Canada, the US and other countries (it’s mind-boggling how everyone has just joined the chorus!!) and it is utterly cruel and inhumane, as well as terribly uninformed.
It should be MY decision to take risk if in fact it exists. It is MY life. It MY body and, as a responsible adult, it should be MY own choice what I put in in, or don’t put in it.
The truth is that my heart and blood pressure medications, the air pollution, and all the food additives one literally cannot avoid, are probably killing me faster than my painkiller.
Eleanor Lawrie, Author 