8:54pm December 19, 2014

So some dude dressed as Santa and robbed one of my pharmacies of some narcotics.

My morning staff was there while the cops questioned the pharmacist, my evening staff heard it on the radio.

Of course, I can’t just see it was a ridiculous story. Whenever something like this happens, several groups of people have to pay in their own way:

1. The doctors who prescribe the drugs. Including docs who, like most docs, are already prescribing them either at or below what pain patients need.

2. The pain patients, who are often forced onto more dangerous, less effective drugs. Including drugs that will never work for the purpose they’re being prescribed. Like Neurontin (gabapentin) and Lyrica (pregabalin). Which work wonders for neuropathic pain that opiates barely touch.

Lyrics, Neurontin, chave been a godsend for people with some of the most painful conditions known to medicine, where you can start out with no history of mental illness, but a short time with this pain can maker you want to kill yourself. Anyway for people with neuropathy, neuralgia, or central pain, these needs save lives. Never forget that, if you hear people saying things like"Neurontin is a scam, it didn’t work for pain.“

But there’s a reason they say it’s a scam. With so many doctor under scrutiny or even criminal convictions, they look for ways to prescribe things that won’t get them in trouble. Even if it’s Neurontin fit musculoskeletal pain, or Celebrex for trigeminal neuralgia. And these are meds with much more severe and dangerous short- and long-term side effects than opiates.

They will also send you for ineffectiver unproven treatments, or simply Kurds effective treatments. Mindfulness meditation, psychotherapy, acupuncture, and many more. Sometimes they work, but if your pain is extremely severe you’re going to need more than these approaches.

Never mind that a person in severe pain from early childhood will, by adulthood, know more cognitive pain management strategies than pain psychologists do. Extra bonus fun: Local autistic adults have come to our local pain psychologists armed with journal articles on autistic people’s idiosyncratic responses to pain… only to be told autistic adults don’t exist because autism is a disease of childhood, so we all either die of our get better. Wish I was joking.

3. Drug addicts. Drug addicts are scapegoated by people with disabilities, by doctors, by the government. When they are not the problem, they HAVE a problem. Even when they’re doing awful things to get their drugs, it’s because our society has left them little other choice – getting clean and sober takes time ant effort. In the meanwhile they’ll be looking for their next fix. And doctors and pain patients alike have learned to treat drug abusers as the choir of the problem. But they’re not. They wouldn’t be out doing these things, stealing, wasting ER resources, etc., if they had a safer source of drugs, and addicting treatment as well.

Sho basically when this stuff shows up on the news, I laugh, then I worry. I worry about doctors who want to do the right thing but risk inn their jobs or licenses for prescribing the safest and most effective pain meds we’ve still got despite tons of research over time. I worry about pain patients killing themselves due to inadequate pain control. And I worry about addicts being scapegoated by the entire system but given no way to control their addictions.

It’s just a mess. And I bet the same thing happens to people who have to take ADHD meds in adulthood.

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