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Pain[/caption]Osteoporosis and diabetic neuropathy are conditions that often bring intense pain to their victims, but in the fallout from prescription drug abuse, those victims are left to suffer.
What's more is that many medications lead to addiction, a problem dealt with by professionals in the various states, from Oregon to Louisiana.
As prescription drug abuse increases, and the media focuses attention on it, more and more doctors are refusing to prescribe prescription pain medications, the type of which can offer some relief to those in serious pain. Instead, doctors remind their patients of the problems of addiction and then restate the option of over-the-counter medications that are indicated for mild, not intense, pain.
Recently, a patient reported how a local Portland doctor said to his patient asking for pain medication, an elderly individual with both diabetic neuropathy and osteoporosis, “Let me give you something for that,” after which he prescribed a muscle relaxer and Motrin. “These will help you feel better.” In the past he had offered opiate medications but had withdrawn these, despite the fact the patient had taken only 30 low dosage pills during a period of five months. No other options were offered, not even the alternatives of massage or physical therapy.
A Louisiana dentist has been particularly circumspect about opiates, even after procedures that ordinarily warrant them. He had been under scrutiny by state authorities for having given “too much” medication to his regular patients. It turns out that he had offered Vicodin on two separate occasions for someone who had two separate sessions with abscesses in the teeth. He had done the same for two other patients in the same period, both with severe pain from difficult dental procedures.
The victims of prescription drug abuse involve more than those in families who suffer the loss of loved ones, the loss of careers and families, and the scandal involved when the abuse is made public. The fallout also includes those sufferers of chronic and acute pain conditions for which the alternatives have been diminished or taken away entirely. But as some doctors have withdrawn pain support, others are researching how pain is manifested individually and what are the separate and individualized care that can appropriately address the pain.
Anesthesiologist and neurophysiologist Timothy Ness, M.D., and his colleagues at UAB’s Chronic Pain Treatment Center (CPTC) tell us “What I can promise when people come to us at the pain clinic is that, as a physician, I will systematically go through the options that I think are appropriate based on my current understanding of pain and how pain works,” he says. “That’s all any of us can promise, really.”
There is also the religious response to pain, one that relates how Christ suffered and that suffering reflects one's understanding of how God works and that turning to God is the answer. How much of that view is involved in the reluctance to offer pain medication is based upon how the doctor's personal beliefs enter into his/her practice of medicine. But in any case the victims of these issues remain those for whom pain has become a lifelong sentence of debilitation.
