Dangerously Addictive Painkiller Prescribed for Patients Who Shouldn’t Have Received It..., page 4

originally posted by: Serdgiam
a reply to: peter vlar

This entire topic is rather baffling to me, and immensely frustrating.

It doesn't matter what your records say, for the most part. If you are taking certain medications, you will likely be treated a certain way.

Too true unfortunately. It doesn't help matters either when you've got tattoos, huge beard and a shaved head and you're being prescribed these types of medications. The level of judgement I deal with on a near daily basis is hilarious.

Beyond that, I swear its easier to receive proper pain management with relatively minor medical issues. The more serious they get, the tougher it seems to get proper pain management on any level.

You're on the money with this observation. After being discharged, when the VA decided that my issues weren't service related, I couldn't afford insurance. As a result, like many Americans, my only option was a series of ER visits because I couldn't afford to pay out of pocket for my GP. They were handing out prescriptions and giving me bags of samples narcotics as if I were Trick or Treating at a pharmacy. And that was with no imaging and no tests aside from an X-ray.

Fast forward a decade, I've got insurance, visit my GP regularly, get my annual physicals and bloodwork, try to be proactive and not wait until it's too late and try to do proper preventative care all that adult stuff that I should've done in my 20's. Despite all that, after I swapped out my acetabulum and half my femur for a titanium/ceramic prosthesis,
I was talked down to with such scathing condescension by the surgeons PA that I won't ever visit that Orthopedic group ever again because he told me right to my face that I was a liar and he didn't believe that I was in any pain and that I just liked the pills. Were that the case though, I seriously doubt that I would have requested that they change the medication and dosage to something with less side effects (post surgical dilauded gave me auditory hallucinations, not a good time I can assure you).

Drugs like fentanyl are pretty nasty, but they do work. I have similar issues to you (L instead of C), along with 8 fractured thoracic vertebrae that are all 60%+ compressed. Due to a metabolic bone disorder, they don't heal, they just continue to fracture. Its quite painful.

I have some lumbar issues myself. Basically, at 43 I have the spine and and arthritis that you would normally see in someone twice my age. My cervical spine issues though make the rest of it pale in comparison. A couple of years ago I had an issue with a doctors office and none of my scrips could get filled and I went through such severe withdrawal that the spasms in my back jerked my neck so hard that the then undiagnosed cervical spondylosis reared it's ugly head quite quickly. I went to bed one night and my pinky was tingling. Woke up the next morning and couldn't feel my left hand or arm and my face drooped as if I had just had a stroke because I damaged the ulner nerve so badly. They wanted to do surgery right then but I refused. Spent 5 months doing PT 4 days/wk until I got about 90% of the original functionality in my hand and arm. Which still sucked because after the Army, I painted and played music as a form of self therapy and both became exceedingly difficult without the full use of my left hand. I still write music and play bass but basically had to relearn that skill and change the way I played. But you just have to adapt and overcome as best you can and not let this crap hold you back.

When I hear about how easy it is to get opioid medication, I have to wonder what is really going on. I had to fight tooth and nail to be taken seriously, and it was only after a seizure induced by sleep deprivation (due to the pain) that anything changed. Despite my condition worsening over the past ~10 years, my prescriptions have slowly been tapered and I have been told to "meditate and get acupuncture."

Are you sure we don't see the same doctors? Been down all of those roads and back again! Tooth and nail to find a doctor who would take me seriously and actually order tests to see if I was faking it for drugs or actually in serious pain? Put a big ole check mark next to that's one! Grand map seizure while cooking Thanksgiving dinner and getting a birthday cake finished for my daughter and put my head through the wall when I went into convulsions and fell backwards? Oh yeah... that was my daughters birthday/Thanksgicing 2014. Acupuncture? Chiropractors? Medical Massage? Tens Unit electrostimulation of nerves? Nerve conduction studies, acupressure, 100's of hours of PT, traction (I actually have a special hydraulic neck traction unit at home) and on and on.

Everything I've got going on is degenerative. And going by your posts, though know exactly what I'm talking about because this stuff will only get worse and in many cases, surgical "repair" either makes existing issues worse or creates a host of new challenges for the patient in question. For some of us, the best and least invasive option, is to take medication and at least be able to maintain some semblance of a normal life.

I'm thoroughly convinced there is something strange happening around this topic and given the governments history of involvement with various substances.. I have to wonder what they are up to.

When large portions of the populace are high on opiates they're either too Hugh to care or too. Yay looking for the next fix to pay attention to how screwed up the real world actually is. And the few who still pay attention are dismissed as just a bunch of junkies. Not terribly dissimilar from how other substances were criminalized between 1913 and the 1950's as a way to invoke racist policies. One example being "Reefer Madness" and the ensuing campaign that insinuated that Negroes and Mexicans high on marijuana would rape white women.

It seems there are nothing but extremes. Either minimal, borderline cruel, "management" or over-the-top excessive prescription writing. The only area that seems to have a modicum of balance is cancer treatment, but even that isn't immune.

I think part of that is that while there are federal laws governing prescriptions, how they're dispensed, classified and scheduled etc...but each state has their own laws. Some very lax, some overly strict. Where I live for example, we have some of the most stringent laws in the country. All narcotics have to be Escribed to a pharmacy. It's basically an electronic, computerized system so that every prescription in the state can be tracked...when it was sent, filled and picked up. ID has to be shown and typed into the system, any doctor or pharmacy can and does look up when you last filled your medications, what meds you have had, who prescribed it. Pretty much anything and everything to do with your prescription history is there for the taking. On the surface, it all seems reasonable and common sense. It makes doctor shopping all but impossible, makes it incredibly difficult to forge or alter a prescription when it goes directly from your doctors computer to the pharmacies computer and there is no physical prescription anymore. But then the conspiracy theorist in me is a little paranoid having all of that information in a system that so many people can access.