The Pandemic of Prescription Drugs

Originally posted by Asktheanimals


If they would just treat the people properly who need help there wouldn't be such a huge underground business in dealing pain medications.

I am watching the Situation in the US very much because
"Society and Pain" is one of my Main-Topics,
Statistics say there is only one Country which prescribe more Morphine-Type Drugs
like the US and this is afir Denmark
but the numbers of related death by this type of Drugs is nearly Zero!

There is no problem in the Galenics to made or create a Medicament
which become uninteresting for hedonistic Desires
but this is not wanted by the FDA in the US,
for example Oxicodone -
before they changed the Release Mechanism
it was "the Killer Nr.1",
now, since 2 years the Numbers are going down
because the Pills can't get injected anymore
but they needed 1.000 of Deaths until they changed it!

In North-Europe we have kind of a Passport for Opioids,
maybe this is the way to go in the US!

reply to post by tinkytink1207

I am tired of threads like this blaming the worlds problems on drugs!! People make bads decisions period! They will get drugs whether legally or not.

This is exactly why the prescription drug problem is SO DANGEROUS!

Many of these people, like my wife, and her mother, and my cousin, will not take illegal drugs, and they are not making bad decisions. They are simply going to see their doctor, for a legitimate concern. Their doctor writes a prescription, but also refers them to a specialist. The specialist sees them, and writes another prescription. Pretty soon, they have 2 or 3 legal prescriptions, they trust their doctors, they take their meds, the go to sleep, and they DON'T WAKE UP!

You have touched on exactly the point I was trying to make! Too many people think this is drug abuse. There are a huge number of cases where the drugs were not abused. The people had no history of drug abuse. They didn't take more than the prescribed dose. They didn't make any bad decisions, except to trust their doctors.

My cousin that died a few months ago, was not even on the drugs more than a month or so before he died. He had a painful divorce, and he subsequently lost his job. His doctor prescribed some anti-depressants. A month later, he got a new job, a physical one, and he found a new girlfriend, and life was looking good. He hurt himself at work one day, and he got prescribed a painkiller and a muscle relaxer. He went home, he took his meds, he had a beer with his dinner, he went to bed and cuddled up to his new girlfriend. The next morning, she couldn't wake him up, and he was dead. 40 years old. No history of drug abuse, no excessive dosage, just a known risk of drug interactions, compounded by the fact that he had a beer. It was ruled accidental death, and partially attributed to pre-existing sleep apnea, which he was unaware of, and partially attributed to the alcohol in his blood.

Some of these people are dying, and they are not making bad decisions. That is the whole point of the thread, and the whole point of trying to raise people's awareness!

reply to post by tinkytink1207


We're not talking about prohibition. We're also not talking about those who REALLY need pain pills.
We're talking about overprescribing and giving drugs to those who don't need them.

Personally, I'd like to see MJ legalized and alcohol taxed more. I think alcohol has ruined more lives than we can count. It's also used to ply women into doing things they wouldn't normally do, but this is for a whole 'nother thread.

Originally posted by Afterthought
Another thing that's messed up are the amount of commercials marketing these drugs.
"Ask your doctor about (fill in the blank)."
These should not be allowed.

I agree, the advertisements should be outlawed again! They should not be able to advertise prescription meds. Advertising prescription meds, leads to people asking specifically for those meds, which leads people to create symptoms to get those meds.

And some of the commercials make depression look so cute and harmless. That little black cloud lurking around behind you with his cute shenanigans. Who wouldn't want that?

Originally posted by Afterthought
reply to post by starlitestarbrite

 

I'm sorry to hear that your friend has chosen to live a life where she doesn't want to feel her emotions because they are too painful. I'd suggest turning her doctor into investigators, but if he were shut down, she'd simply find another "candy man". It's hard to wake up someone who has gone so far down into the darkness. Stopping her meds is probably worse for her health than staying on them at this point. For example, I was on Cymbalta for two years to ease my fibromyalgia, but decided to quit taking them cold turkey one day. Wow! That was a bad decision. I had sensory hallucinations and couldn't go out in public for three weeks because I was too scared to drive and didn't feel normal enough to even be around people. Bad stuff. I wish now that I'd weaned myself off of them, but what's done is done and I'm just happy I made it through the withdrawl symptoms.

Thank you I am glad you got through the withdrawls I can't even imagine how hard it is... and I do think her parents have spoken with her DR but somehow managed to get it in their minds it's the illness making her the way she is WHICH I KNOW IT IS NOT the case I live 2 houses away they live in FLA.
I am not calling out all Drs giving out these meds theres always one bad apple in the bunch!
Now I have a overly protective Dr who wouldn't ever prescribe me anything stronger than tylenol for pain
I remember asking him for a few valium because I was having a hard time with losing my mom and he said no to me I guess I really didn't need them because I got through the first week and survived (barely).

reply to post by getreadyalready


Excellent post.

And to reply to the codien thread.
I am not going to argue with anyone here as I am extremely familiar with opiate toxicity.
But I wanted to point out.
You know what is funny?
Opiates are still the most effective drug, and from a toxicological standpoint the safest!
Yes it causes addiction, but amazingly it doesn't damage the body like other drugs. It is done usually in tandem.
Now I am not going to argue with anyone here on opiate toxicity as I have studied it for over 1o years, so I have simplified by message, if you want to research it do it. You will be amazed, check the clinical studies, etc.
Now, not saying opiates are safe or do not cause addiction, but if current psychiatry drugs are a 1oo on a scale of hundred in harm, opiates are around the 5 point mark.
Seriously!

And overdose doesn't count, as you can overdose on anything!!!
I hope a few actually toxicity researchers back me up here on this, but most people are not very knowledgable on this area of specifics.

reply to post by BBalazs


You bring up another good point.

A body develops a tolerance for opiates, and thus the dosage has to be continually increased. If you are under a doctors constant care, this is not a problem, and the opiates are extremely effective, and relatively safe.

BUT, another key area of danger is in sharing meds. Someone with zero opiate tolerance, might think it is ok to take one of grandma's pills, without realizing grandma has built up a 20 year tolerance! That grandma dosage can be lethal for a teenager, especially if combined with alcohol and xanax, which is a favorite party combination!

And I agree 100% on the danger scale of opiates compared to brain-altering chemicals. The brain-altering chemicals used to treat depression and psychiatric illness are much more frightening and unpredictable.

reply to post by getreadyalready


Exactly, but there is really no such thing as opiate toxicity, not like with prescription drugs.
Even on wikipedia on opiates, there is no mention of toxicity, having glanced over it.
because it doesn't exist. it is a poison, that reduces the breathing, collapsing the lungs, if overdosed, but this is not toxicity, it not like the toxic substances accumulate in your adipose or other tissues or liver, etc. although USING the term ver broadly, you could say that poisoning in toxicity, but then everything is toxic to an extent, and you can die from taking too much of anything, including water.
anyway, i don't want to derail the thread, perhaps people who take antidepressants would be better of taking low level opiates. but thats for another thread.
i don't want to derail this thread, so just read my comment with curiosity and leave it be. open a new thread if anyone wants to debate it.



and one more thing, absolutely DO NOT TAKE opiates without supervision, as pointed out in above post. I write this, just to warn anyone who may misunderstand what I write. In no ways, do I mean to say anything like it, I am just pointing out a curiosity regarding toxicity! It is not an alternative, just a curiosity of toxicity I have pointed too.
in fact stay away from ALL drugs if you can, including opiates, and mind altering antidepressants and such.

I've spent most of the past year in more pain than I'd been in over the previous 36 combined. I had painful muscle spasms and sciatic pain 24/7, didn't matter if I was standing, sitting, lying, moving (or trying to move), the whole left side of my body felt like it was trying to retreat inside my body tortoise-like.

The hospital and my own GP prescribed valium and traxamol, which didn't treat the condition at all, they just blurred me out of my head so I didn't notice I was in agony. When the pills wore off, the pain was back, and getting progressively worse.

I was awake for 36 hours at a stretch, so I researched my symptoms, and discovered that doctors treat all sciatic pain as the same, and treat the same, when in fact there's 4 different causes of sciatic pain, but 3 of them aren't considered by your doctor.

I told my doctor that I was going to look for a non-drug solution that worked, if one existed, and he was very supportive of that. The thing to remember is that your symptoms, your pain, are your problem. As far as your doctor is concerned, your symptoms take up 20 minutes of his day, and then he has another person to see, and another. Doctors aren't computers, they haven't memorised every medical condition, and all the really good doctors who aced their exams aren't sitting in a GP's office 5 days a week.

I found the cause of my pain, and from that I found a natural, effective treatment that has me on the road to recovery, and I don't believe another few courses of valium would have done that. My doctor thinks I'm great, he wishes more of his patients approached their own care the way I have. At every stage, before trying anything, I consulted with my doctor by phone.

GP's don't have unlimited resources, they're not all Gregory House, all they have is a database of prescription medication. When I joined the dots, muscles need magnesium to relax, so a magnesium deficiency can lead to muscle spasms. The majority of us in the industrialised world are deficient in magnesium to some degree. It's been stripped out of our water, our soil, our food. Magnesium is involved in over 350 different processes in our bodies, it's absolutely vital. All those processes mean that for different people, that deficiency can manifest in different ways. However, there was nothing on the doctor's database that addressed magnesium deficiency, which meant there was nothing he could do.

Big Pharma has, I believe, encouraged ignorance in regard to magnesium. If all of us were getting enough magnesium, there wouldn't be ADHD, or widespread Type 2 Diabetes, there'd be a lot fewer heart attacks, and a great many more of these "new" conditions are just fancy names for magnesium deficiency. If we all had enough magnesium in our bodies, Big Pharma would just be pharma.

So, a bag of epsom salts, made up 1 cup of salts to 1 cup of water, and then heated until it's all dissolved. I put that into a spray bottle and apply it directly to the skin where the spasms are going on.

I'd taken every medicine the doctor could prescribe, and none of it worked. There was relief of pain due to being doped out of consciousness, but nothing stopped the spasms.

1 application of the magnesium solution un-spasmed me in 10 minutes. They came back later, but with each application the gap before the spasms returned got larger. After a few weeks, as long as I applied the spray once a day, I was good to go, no spasms, no pain.

Every hospital has bags of epsom salts in it's maternity wards. If the hospital doctor I'd seen had given me a bag of epsom salts (very cheap) instead of 2 packs of useless drugs (not cheap) I'd have been out of pain months before I was. Magnesium deficiency is the primary cause of muscle spasms, so really, it should be the first thing to try.

reply to post by getreadyalready


There is the problem. I've been on the same amount of meds for 3 years and increasingly they work less and less. It's getting to the point where I never get relief and my doctor will not increase them.
If I take more I could get relief but then I would run out early so I just put up with it everyday and frankly it's wearing me down. I know there's an upper limit to what they can prescribe but if you have no quality of life then whats the point in not adjusting them for the tolerance factor?
The doctor tells me it's like a dog chasing it's tail or a vicious spiral if you will. After 4 years it's just not working anymore.
All I can hope for is some new development that find a way to treat whats going on with me. Otherwise you'll know why I haven't showed up here for weeks.

reply to post by Asktheanimals


There are solutions to the need for increasing dosages. I don't know what type of doctor you see, but there are some very good pain clinics that are experts at alternating drugs, and alternating delivery methods. I can think of one in Jacksonville off the top of my head. They do urine testing to see how the drugs are metabolizing, and make sure you are taking the proper dosage, and then they engineer an individual plan for each patient that will limit the effects of the tolerance build up.

Fetanyl Patches, Methadone, enhancers like Xanax can all be used to make the drugs stay effective longer.

Though, eventually you have to find the source of the pain and take permanent action. Fusing a spinal column, or replacing a joint, or deadening some nerves, or finding what type of mineral or chemical is building up in your body to cause the pain.

I know there are people that live with devastating pain, my wife is one of them, but in my opinion, all pain meds are only temporary fixes while you research a permanent solution. Even if it takes years and years to find a root cause and address it, we still need to be diligent in our search for the underlying issue.

Since this thread popped up last night I have avoided reading it because I figured it was another "all drugs are bad" thread. I took note that it was authored by Getreadyallready, who I enjoy reading btw, but I still voided it. This morning however nothing else was holding my attention so I figured if something on the internet was gonna piss me off, it might as well be from someone I have a little respect for. Now I'm sitting here completely humbled by the fact I should not have judged this thread by it's title. There is some well thought out information here and I hope more people take the time to read it and understand what is posted.

Last summer I had a family member fall victim to the prescription drug candy bowl. She ended up on 3 different types of antidepressants, plus various other meds to deal with side effects from those drugs. She was never a pill taker, but after having to kids and the resulting hormonal changes (causing mild depression and severe headaches) see decided to see a doctor. That one doctor was responsible for the entire fiasco that landed her in the hospital cardiac ward at age 37. Unfortunately for her she trusted the doctor she was seeing because he was a friend of her husband. She never researched the meds he had prescribed & had no idea the danger she was in. Today she has a new doctor, is doing well and thankfully seems to have no lasting damage.

Like I stated before, I hope more people read this thread and realize there is more to prescription drugs than what they are spoon fed by the media and their doctors. Some people do need these drugs and people also need to be their own advocates and research what they are prescribed. Never rely on a doctor or pharmacy staff to keep you healthy and safe.

Thanks for the thread!!!

OiO

reply to post by TheIrvy


I'm so happy you took the initiative and discovered your vitamin deficiency.

I'm also now taking Magnesium for muscle and joint pain. As soon as I discovered that Fluoride prevents your body from absorbing Magnesium, the light bulb went off. I feel lots better now and the only pain remaining exists in my ankles (both surgically reconstructed) and neck (car accident). It's a lot easier dealing with just these pains instead of my entire body being achy.

reply to post by Wrabbit2000


Vitamin D is very important. We do not get enough from the sun due to many reasons. I am not sure I would take a script version, but I do the OTC. Just get the Vit D 3. You really do need that. I am lucky at 48 I take NO regular meds. I refuse to. It seems that everyone I know takes one or more pills for the most benign things. Avoid the doctor and live longer! ha.

Originally posted by Asktheanimals
reply to post by getreadyalready

 

There is the problem. I've been on the same amount of meds for 3 years and increasingly they work less and less. It's getting to the point where I never get relief and my doctor will not increase them.

The Doc need to change in between Medications,
we do this normally every 6-9 Month depending on the age of the Patients!
(like for example 6 month Fentanyl followed by 6 month Morphines [Opiate]
followed by 6 month a Opioid again)

All the Doc have to do is to find the equivalent Dosage

Regards,
i am a Pain-Patient too but i chose Non-Pharmacological Treatments
because my Pain started when i was 20 and now i am close to the 50,
all this Years with a permanent Opioid Use instead would be Catastrophic!

the other day i cited a older article about the untimely death of former wrestler Randy Savage..

but i left out most of the copy i have had since ? June of last year ?

here's what my thoughts were about that death cover-up

~ my PC > briefcase:

Thu Jun 30 10:48pm EDT

Autopsy reveals Randy ‘Macho Man’ Savage died of natural causes
By Chris Chase

At the time of his death, it was unknown whether the former wrestling star had died because of the heart issue or because the heart issue caused him to crash.
The coroner said Savage was found with therapeutic levels of a number of prescribed drugs in his system and that alcohol wasn't a factor.
There was no evidence he was taking any heart medication, leading to the assumption that Savage may not have known about his condition.
...

?? A Number of 'Prescribed Drugs' in his system... but nothing for the heart ailment !? whats that about

were the Prescription drugs his... or was it a case of taking a prescribed pharaceutical, not as the "patient" but RX drugs as a user...

i know that lots of people get into the (Suboxone Treatment and Detox -

Suboxone (buprenorphine with naloxone) is currently available for the maintenance treatment of opioid addiction. Suboxone treatment is intended for use in adults and ...

www.addictionsearch.com/treatment_articles/article/
or the treatment cousin: 'methadone'

look around at all the various HCL products we are sold into needing

there are state directed methadone clinics that specialize in treating opiate related addictions ...
then there is another level of treatment.. the suboxone program


the federal govt, the states too are well aware of the RX abuse scourge...in my world of friends & connected world... there are two families with addicted sons or daughters & they have been in treatment programs for 13 years and 5 years... it seems the treatment is not meant for a 'Recovery' result, just the management of the subject and the low level intrusion into privacy that getting (urgently needed) daily doses involves

I wanted to address a previous comment about getting narcotic prescriptions filled. The reason it can be difficult without verification from a doctor or if you're a new patient is the insane amout of bogus scripts pharmacists have to deal with in the course of the day.

I personally believe that our own Gov, and medical professionals, know Exactly what is going on, they are the ones who pass it, back it, and sell it. Its all about profits, and has nothing to do with actually getting a cure. I know so many of my friends who had such a great life, only to have it stripped away, and are now 6 feet under, sad. And what is even sadder, is if you are on Opiates, and want to get off, they have these Methadome clinics, that are supposed to help you get off, only to become addicted to the methadome, its a Sham, seek real help, from an actual Sober living place, not a methadome clinic.

reply to post by getreadyalready


YOUR take on this is extremely naive.

The only reason why there isn't a black market for Tylenol is because it is readily available and LEGAL. And Tylenol kills your liver if you take too much you will die a MUCH earlier death because of it. Google it, you'll find tons of news articles.

People died from drinking street grade alcohol during the probation days too. People made RIDICULOUS amounts of money from alcohol just because it was illegal. "Sold their souls", blabla the same anti-drug propaganda out there. Prohibition creates that culture, that is all...

If you educate yourself about the drugs before you take it then you WILL not mix it and won't end up dying. End of story..... Education is the key, not the drugs. If you take Xanax, and 2 other types of Benzos and mix alcohol...you have a pretty good chance of killing yourself, like Whitney. It is HER fault, no one else.

1.Every time you get a prescription filled it comes with a pamphlet LISTS known drug interactions.

2.There are websites DEDICATED just to telling you drug interactions

It is YOUR fault if you don't take 5 minutes to read. It is YOUR body, YOU have to take care of it. There is no excuse for the ignorance. And if there is MAJOR drug interaction possible it will list it on the bottle itself.

If a person goes to 20 different doctors to get 20 different pills then that person has an ADDICTION problem. If it wasn't from the doctors they would go to the streets. Addiction is a mental disease..it's not caused by doctors. 99% of pills that you can get prescribed will NOT get you high or ANY sort of high anyway.

How is this anything near a conspiracy theory?..If you take too much of anything..you generally die, even water. People are lazy and don't take the time to read. Conspiracy?...no. It is just what most humans do

reply to post by Human0815


I deleted my info , because i felt that it could be abused, sorry for that