The CDC can suck my ass
For friends not in the spoonie community, this is about the CDC’s recent guidelines that attempt to combat drug addiction in America by severely restricting access to opioid medications for ALL patients except for terminal cancer patients.
Without opioid pain medications, I would have had to quit working and go on disability nine years before I did.
Without opioid pain medications I would have been housebound and dependent on caregivers for another 10 years after that.
Without opioid pain medications I will be less active, more sedentary, and more sick.
The CDC says opioids don’t work for chronic pain; they’re wrong. They don’t work for some chronic pain. They don’t cure chronic pain. But they make life liveable for millions of chronic pain patients. Estimates of chronic pain sufferers in America range from a low of 39 million to a high of 110 million. That low-water mark excluded people with intermittent chronic pain, like endometriosis or migraine, as well as omitting people with neurogenic pain. Most reasonable guesses put the number at 70–80 million.
The cure for drug abuse and addiction has nothing to do with restricting pain patients’ access to medication, or forcing them to give up what quality of life they have managed to attain through having their pain managed with medication.
It’s not about labeling pain patients as addicts for taking medication to which they can build a physical dependence. (By that definition, every time I go on prednisone and have to taper off it, I’m a prednisone addict!)
It’s not about calling a patient in chronic pain asking their doctor for relief a drug-seeker.
The cure lies in combating the issues that lead to drug abuse, like poverty and an economy that sees the rich getting richer while the poor and middle class fall further and further behind. It lies in giving hope to people in hopeless situations. Not taking hope away from several million more.
Reblog to educate the normals. We need a cultural perception shift, and it needs to start now.
I make a hobby of watching documentaries about heroin (don’t ask) and all of them in recent years have a terrifying but obvious agenda: opioid pain reliever restriction.
They harp on the fact that a high percentage of heroin addicts began by taking prescription painkillers, but they never bring up how many prescription painkiller users become heroin users. Every time I watch one, they get to the part where addicts (current and recovering) talk about how they started on oxy/vic/perc after an injury and eventually moved to heroin, almost universally it’s because the pills got too hard to get, and I get irritated. Usually the pills are blamed for the transition to heroin, despite the fact that earlier in the documentaries the same individuals often speak about prior addictive behavior with pot and alcohol. (Very rarely is Purdue Pharma’s incredibly troubling insistence on misprescription addressed – and when it is, it too includes the “pain pills to heroin” narrative.)
Quick Google stats: there were 259 million painkiller prescriptions written in 2012. That same year heroin use was estimated at 2 people per 1000, meaning with a population of 314 million and given a likelihood of under-reporting, we had roughly 6-700 thousand heroin addicts in the US. At most, a million.
So even if many of those prescriptions were for the same people, and even if every single heroin addict was the direct result of a pain pill prescription (not super duper likely), the vast majority of people who got prescription painkillers somehow, magically, didn’t become addicted to heroin.
It’s almost like addiction involves multiple emotional, physical, genetic, and environmental factors that have nothing to do with prescription pain relief but opioids are an easy scapegoat for grieving families to pin their pain to.
I see the points being raised here, but at the same time as a massage therapist I feel like there should be different options for managing pain other than taking pills that have potential negative side effects (entirely separate from the issue of addiction, which is a very real thing: Vicodin was the gateway drug for my sister, who wound up killing herself).
What I would like to see happen is for insurance companies to start paying for complementary and alternative medicine–like massage and acupuncture–at the same rate that they have been prescribing opioids. There are so many other options out there and I really hope that this national conversation will push the medical field in that direction.
I would prefer insurance companies cover whatever helps people – but this isn’t the place to talk about that. We’re talking about people who have tried the other options and have been left with pain pills as a last option. I also know people who have addiction problems related to pain medication, and I’m sorry for your loss – but we should treat that with a better system for addiction, not by hurting chronic pain patients
“But people become dependent on these” well yeah because without them they have a very poor quality of life. It’s almost like people who take their prescriptions start feeling better and seeing improvements??? So they continue to take their prescriptions????
^^^ exactly. i’m dependent on not feeling like shit.
When I did the numbers on this the other day, using the National Pain Report’s numbers on chronic pain patients, and cross-checking them with the ADA’s numbers on other illnesses, what I came up with was this:
10K deaths from opioid pills specifically.
100 million Americans with chronic pain.
.0001 percent of Americans with chronic pain will die from opioid overdose.
That’s what is called “statistically insignificant.”
For perspective, a woman is twice as likely to die in childbirth in the developed world as a chronic pain patient is to die of an opioid overdose. Why aren’t we talking about the ‘epidemic’ of women dying in childbirth? You’re as likely to be killed by lightning which first hit someone else. WILL NO ONE THINK OF THE LIGHTNING EPIDEMIC?
For contrast, using the ADA’s numbers for diabetics n the US, .004 percent of diabetics die directly from complications of diabetes every year. While that’s still a tiny number compared to the population, not only is it orders of magnitude larger in percentages, but 65K people died from complications of diabetes.
Six and a half times as many! Six and a half!
And that’s not even talking about things like heart conditions and the like.
So I say this as a person who is currently and without shame on an opioid pain management plan (along with other solutions including massage, steroid shots, and other things that frankly aren’t anybody else’s business but whatever), and who has watched a very close friend lose her mother to diabetes complications this year… why are we okay with stigmatizing one medication (pain relief) over another type (insulin/diabetes).
Well, I mean, there really isn’t any money in “addiction counseling” for insulin. There are just deaths.
I wish people saw pain the same way, because pain will kill you too.
I’M DEPENDANT ON NOT FEELING LIKE SHIT! Oh my god. @painandcats Thank you for that sentence!!
20 years of “you’re too young to know what pain is”, “ I’m old and I have arthritis, you don’t know what pain is”, IT TOOK GETTING CANCER FOR MY FAMILY TO AGREE THAT I MIGHT BE IN PAIN. I have been disabled since I was 14 (or 6, depending on which pain related ailment you look at).
Now I have oxycodone. Now my home is clean. Now I am involved in caring for my son. Now I can walk my dogs. Now I can face the prospect of having a service dog. Now I can go to church regularly. Now I can be active in my church group. Now I can hang out with my friends without spending 3 days recovering.
Opiates make my life possible.
I am so, so thankful for opiates!
Reblogging for all the good comments
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Death By Catchphrase 