Opioid, Schmopioid

american thinker ^ | 7/14/2017 | r j kozar

[arthurus]

Years ago there was a doctor here who had a gift, a talent beyond his training. He saved my life and wasn’t even my doctor. The hospital kept sending me home saying I was having hysterical episodes when I stopped breathing. Dr Williams looked at me and said I was bleeding to death and got MRI ordered and found my spleen was ruptured. He was never my doctor and I never got a bill from him. Two if his patients OD’d and died while the feds were doing a local investigation on opiate prescriptions. They immediately arrested him and tried him in federal court. He died in Federal prison. I went to his memorial service at his church, the locally biggest black church. I went to say what Dr Williams had done for me. I found myself in a long line of people, some from the upper reaches of local society, who came to talk about the good doctor. It was all the same story. “I couldn’t get relief and the doctors, mine and the ones in the hospital, couldn’t find out anything. Dr Williams came into the room and asked me how I was and looked at me and then at my chart - he wasn’t even scheduled to be there - and called in another doctor and told him what to do for me and he was right. If he hadn’t walked in I find I would have had perhaps months to live” It was different stories and different problems and circumstances but basically that was it. “He just looked at me and knew what it was.” Well those two patients who died had been getting street drugs, too, and that didn’t make a difference at his trial. He was an “example.”

[from occupied ga]

The doctors who over-prescribe are responsible in large part for the problem

Do you even read what you write? In the paragraph just before you said this, you wrote:

but the doctors ... will continue to write refills as long as the patient asks for it.

So in your mind it's the doctors' fault for writing the prescription, NOT the fault of the person who is asking for the medication. How does this make sense to you? How is the doctor to know if the person is in pain or not?

[Kenton]

So in your mind it's the doctors' fault for writing the prescription, NOT the fault of the person who is asking for the medication.

No, in the cases I mentioned, it's very much the fault of the person who is asking for the medication. I'm specifically talking about someone who sustained a minor back injury a year ago but who continues to get monthly prescriptions for vicoden, percosets and xanax.

He had initally been given a prescription for a painkiller. After about a week, the pain was gone to the point where occasional aspirin took care of the pain. But he still had all these pills left over. So he started using them for recreational purposes, to enhance his nightly beer buzz.

Then other people found out about what he was up to and started offering to buy his extra pills. Seeing this as an easy way to enhance his income, he continued to request and receive prescription refills for at least the past year.

I think you can see where this is going. And this is one case, there are many others like it.

Opiates work really well for suppressing pain, but they are quietly and subtly addictive, and the doctor knows this. For this reason, ethical doctors will not let their patient stay on the painkillers chronically; they will seek other solutions to the problem, like trying to wean the patient off the narcotics.

But not all doctors are ethical doctors, some are pill pushers, and people with a fondness for opiates will sometimes go "doctor shopping" to find out who they are.

The doctors themselves have to monitor patient usage when they are writing prescriptions. That's all I was trying to say.