This is an important article by Chicago Tribune reporter Katherine Rosenberg-Douglas about the impact that the battle against opioid abuse is having on chronic pain patients. In brief, some patients have legitimate medical needs for large amounts of pain medications, but the new and important restrictions on prescription opioids are making them harder and harder to get. And skepticism makes it worse. Here are some key paragraphs:
I broke my back while Rollerblading when I was 21. After three surgeries beginning at age 30, I’ve recovered enough that I’ve gone on to what looks like a normal life. I’m a married mother of twin 4-year-olds, so I am relatively stressed, but fortunately, I’m otherwise relatively healthy.
I’m also on a fentanyl patch delivering slow and steady pain relief to keep me feeling like I can get out of bed, and morphine for breakthrough pain when life requires more of me than merely getting out of bed — and anyone who has ever had a 4-year-old knows each day is far more demanding than that. Just driving my kids to school or sitting for longer than 20 minutes at a time is a struggle.
Last month, I dropped off a prescription before I started work at 7 a.m. on a Sunday, and the pharmacist said she’d need to speak to the doctor so I probably wouldn’t get it until Monday. I had my doctor paged at 6:30 a.m. Agonizing hours passed before I called and pressed for the reason. She told me there were “great distances involved,” between my address, the doctor’s office and where I was visiting my parents for the weekend — although they’re all about a 45-minute drive, pretty standard for Chicagoland.
“It’s suspicious,” she said.
The previous month a pharmacist told me she wasn’t comfortable with the combination of fentanyl and morphine because, “It’s a lot of pain medicine.”
She filled the fentanyl patches but would not fill the morphine. When possible, I’ve used the same pharmacy chain for much of the past 10 years so there would be an easily accessible log of my prescription history, so I implored her to look. She said she had.
“If anything were to happen to you, I would lose my license, not your doctor,” she told me. I mentioned that without the morphine I’d taken for so long, she was putting me in a more perilous situation than if she did. True, she admitted. “But I have the right to refuse to fill any prescription for any reason, and I choose not to fill this for you.”
You can read the full piece here. And you should.
The hysteria about opioids is mainly because of deaths from overdoses.
But, as usual, political correctness on the left precludes any solutions.
Nearly the entire increase in deaths from overdoes of opioids is because of black market fentanyl, and the source of that fentanyl is, mainly … wait for it, wait for it …
Oh, but, they say, it is coming thru ports of entry, not remote areas where a wall would be built.
See how that twisted logic works? If we are catching fish in this river (because we only fish in this river) it means that there are no fish in the ocean.
First, demonize all opioids because of fentanyl, then argue against increased enforcement at the border, because fentanyl is being seized at the ports of entry.
Once again, the Left will sacrifice ANY principle, including that of freedom to use pain relief, effective border enforcement and truth telling about the "opioid crisis" to import more voters.
What happened to "That is between the patient and her doctor?"