viollethe

1. Have you ever met someone and recognized them as a caller?
2. Have you ever recognized a caller's voice as someone you knew or as someone who had called before?

Also, thank you for doing what you do.

Not OP, but I don't think that was his intention. As he mentions at the end of his comment, prescribers have strategies available to them that will help patients avoid dependence while still getting adequate pain management. IMO, when a patient takes opioids "irresponsibly" that is most often the fault of the prescriber for not truly understanding 1. What opioids should be used to treat, and how much they should prescribe and 2. How to deal with withdrawal, dependence, and tolerance both in short-term users (after surgery, etc.) and long-term ones (like OP with chronic pain).

I'm a researcher in the addiction field (cocaine, but I've still gotten a lot of exposure to opioid research). The truth is that, from the medical perspective, this is a complex issue. This makes me angry, but...doctors don't really know what they're doing a lot of the time. Poor bedside manner, and a total misunderstanding of many medical conditions and their treatments... Keep in mind that many physicians and other prescribers just follow the rules or standards of their hospital when it comes to medical care. That means that decades ago, when the pharmaceutical companies said opioids are good and safe for pain, doctors overprescribed it and had no idea what they were doing. Now, the common understanding, even amongst doctors and hospitals, is "Opioids are bad. Prescribing them is bad. I'm making addicts. I'm opening up the hospital to lawsuits." The reality is something in the middle of those things, as OP suggests - opioids have their place in medicine but must be managed properly. Prescribers are just too lazy or too uninformed to help patients through that process.

The issue from my perspective comes back to the doctors and hospitals. Patients should not be expected to know how to treat their complex medical conditions. That's literally what doctors are for. They shouldn't need to know the safest way to take opioids, the doctor should tell them (and then it is up to the patient at that point to be responsible, given the correct information). The problem is that doctors aren't always reliable and their care is faulty, particularly in this area.