Tough pill to swallow: Our inability to treat pain hurts many
This week’s warning — if you don’t have pain now, either acute or chronic — pray you never will because the chances of you getting legit pain meds, not related to cancer, are slim to none.
Today, you can break a leg and still have a chance that the ER will release you with only a suggestion that you take Tylenol or an ibuprofen.
I ran into a guy I know last week who manages the place where I take my truck for repairs. Recently, he underwent skin-cancer surgery, on his lip no less, where the nerve endings really tend to collect. A week post-op, he was still suffering.
“But the pain has at least let up a little bit,” he said.
Did his doc prescribe him an opioid for pain management, for 10 days, as state law allows?
Nope. Just sent him home with a suggestion that he take Tylenol or Ibuprofen.
“I’ve been shot, stabbed,” this guy told me, “but nothing ever compared to this pain.”
Too many bar fights in his misspent youth.
So this guy was indeed tough, with the street creds to prove it, but this level of pain had brought him to his knees, and his skin surgeon had to know that, but chose not to give him a prescription for a legitimate pain med needed in a legitimate medical setting.
If the physician was ever audited by the DEA, all he had to do was pull up the guy’s medical files and say, “Now you tell me that the pain prescription wasn’t warranted. He had surgery on his lip to remove skin cancer.”
Pretty easy to do.
A hundred years ago, our ancestors had better access to pain meds than we have today — morphine, heroin, laudanum, and early opioids.
The “nanny state” didn’t yet exist.
Morphine was discovered in 1804 and mass produced by the mid-1800s.
Finally, humanity had a way to mitigate severe pain, whether it was due to a broken bone, cancer, war injuries, childbirth, or chronic pain of any kind.
Today, you can have a broken bone, and still risk being discharged from the ER without a 10-day prescription for an opioid, even though Texas allows it.
“Now that we’ve set your broken bone, and inserted screws, just take an Extra Strength Tylenol or Ibuprofen.”
Sure. Now hand me a gun and let me blow my brains out because the pain is killing me, and if it keeps up, I’m going to have a heart attack and die anyway.
$$$ Politicians
I blame the sociopaths, some full-blown psychos, elected to high office in D.C., the petty bureaucrats they appoint to positions of power, and the laziness on the part of some physicians, either ignorant of the law or too afraid of the DEA, for this current systemic failure of modern medicine with regard to the treatment of pain, whether it’s acute (broken leg) or chronic (degenerative arthritis, etc.).
Even most “pain-management” docs will tell you that they “never” prescribe opioids for pain. They’d rather stick needles in you, send you off to physical therapy, than prescribe a medicine that might actually restore one’s quality of life.
Even some pharmacists are clueless when it comes to prescribing opioids. They think they can only dish out a week’s worth at a time. Wrong. Meaning, they’re too lazy to ever look up the state law with regard to filling a prescription for Oxycodone or Hydrocodone.
We are now a nation of sheep, and we have all been cowed into submission.
Most career politicians in D.C. are always looking to shake down somebody with money. Preferably in the billions. Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, you name it, if you have money, the politician has you in his or her starlit $$$ eyes.
The Big Lie
For more than a decade,Americans were told we were in the grip of an “opioid epidemic,” a phrase that first began appearing in national headlines between 2000 and 2010.
But the public was never given a crucial distinction: the difference between illicit fentanyl—a street drug trafficked with help from China and Mexico—and prescription opioids taken by patients under medical supervision. By lumping the two categories together, federal agencies and the national media created a single, dramatic narrative that made it appear as though ordinary pain patients and their doctors were driving a national crisis.
Patients were dropping like flies, so dangerous was a prescription for Hydrocodone or Oxycodone. Some began to fear that if they took even one pill, they’d become an addict overnight.
The real numbers, however, tell a completely different story. It’s just that the politicians have nobody to “shake down,” because they can’t go after the cartels, so they go after Big Pharma, the poor doctors, and the patients in need of legit pain meds.
As early as 2016, fentanyl had already overtaken prescription opioids as the leading cause of overdose deaths. (Source: National Institute of Health.)
Today, more than 85 to 90 percent of so‑called “opioid deaths” involve illicit fentanyl, not medications like the opioids prescribed by physicians. Yet the federal reporting system continues to group them together under one label: “opioids.” That decision on the part of the DEA shaped public perception, political pressure, and ultimately medical policy.
In 2014, the DEA moved Oxycodone-combination products — including medications millions of Americans had used safely for years — from Schedule III to Schedule II, instantly branding them as drugs with a potential for “high abuse.”
Two years later, the CDC released its first opioid prescribing guideline, a document so vague and restrictive that doctors across the country interpreted it as a threat to their licenses, and rightly so.
Many stopped prescribing opioids altogether, just to play it on the safe side even if their patients were screaming in pain.
Chronic pain patients who had been stable for years were suddenly cut off completely from the same pills that had given them a semblance of decent quality of life for years, decades.
“Take a Tylenol.” The backlash was so severe (docs no longer prescribing real pain meds) that in 2019, the CDC issued a rare clarification, acknowledging that its own guideline had been misapplied and had caused harm.
Ya think? But by then, the damage was done. Physicians had been frightened into submission, some pharmacies had tightened their rules in arbitrary fashion, and some insurers had adopted rigid limits on how opioids could be prescribed.
Meanwhile, fentanyl deaths continued to climb.
Why? Because the “opioid crisis” was never about legitimate prescriptions in the first place.
It was about shaking down Big Pharma, suing doctors, hospitals, and it not only included the federal government listed as the plaintiff, but states like Texas, counties, went on a suing rampage of their own, while toasting their good fortune at cocktail events.
Today, chronic pain patients, or those with acute pain, still pay the price for a narrative built on lies and BS, and a media complicit in the falsehood.
American medicine responded to a fabricated fentanyl crisis by restricting prescription medicine, and the people suffering most are the ones left out to dry.