I had no idea she was doing this. She lost me with
her mission statement:
As someone who has lived with pain every waking hour for the last 25 years, her approach isn't helpful. 'Training' doctors to not prescribe opioids because some people abuse them leads to chronic under-treatment of pain, which in turn leads desperate people living with pain to buy off the black market, which leads to people dying of Fentanyl overdoses from using counterfeit opioids of varying degrees of purity. Opioids are both a first- and last- line defense against pain, they are far less harmful to your body over the long term than what they want docs to prescribe instead, NSAIDs. Which also kill hundreds of thousands, in fact my father-in-law very nearly died from kidney failure a couple years ago from one, and I nearly died of a bleeding ucler 20 years ago, again from an NSAID. I now have to take a whole cocktail of drugs to deal with the side-effects of long-term NSAID use. I have bone damage from rather short-term corticosteroid use. But no damage whatsoever from long-term opioid use, nor have I ever had an 'overdose' from being prescribed opioids to manage chronic pain.
The fact that a few people are susceptible to addiction from using them (roughly 10%) and that a fraction of those 10% do become 'addicts' in the classic sense (using them to 'get high') is not grounds to deny people in pain the safest and most effective treatment option for their pain. We don't ban alcohol which has similar addictive properties and arguably no health benefits, despite it killing far more people than opioids. In a trivial sense, any drug that successfully treats a patient's pain will be addictive, in that a person will experience negative physical and emotional effects when the drug is taken from them. That doesn't mean that the majority of people dying from opioids are addicts, because they aren't. The typical Fentanyl overdose victim is a 45-50 year old male construction worker. Someone whose body is being destroyed by his job, can't afford to quit, and can't get adequate treatment through the medical profession. The same people who buy black market Oxycodone.
There are timed-release formulations that are much less susceptible to abuse, and Purdue Pharma's sin was in marketing a highly-addictive drug claiming it wasn't addictive, displacing those other opioids which actually are (nearly) non-addictive. Any 'solution' to the so-called 'opioid crisis' that doesn't put the patients' needs first isn't a solution at all.
Originally Posted by bob carnie
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