Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump say ‘tough it out’ without opioids but they never felt my pain
President Trump’s new proposal to combat opioid addiction included some very tough talk about a tragic problem, so it was easy to miss one ambitious goal: slashing legal opioid prescriptions by one-third.
Similarly, when Attorney General Jeff Sessions suggested that part of the problem is that not enough people are willing to “tough it out,” and that they should be just taking aspirin instead, he quickly got my attention. Recently, I tried to do just that.
In early November, at the age of 53, I spent a week in the hospital and was eventually diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a plasma cancer. Thankfully, there are a variety of treatments that hold the promise of long-term remission. But in the short term, multiple myeloma can be extraordinarily painful and many patients can only get relief by using prescription painkillers such as opioids.
Concerns over opioids are not unfounded. The CDC reports that overdoses from prescription opioids have quadrupled since 1999, numbering over 20,000 in 2015. Those numbers are of real concern, but we cannot forget that there are also real, tangible costs of living with pain — and that pain relief is part of the healing process for patients like me.
Multiple myeloma eats away at the calcium in your bones, weakening them. In my case, it went after my back, causing two small stress fractures and numerous lesions, all of which were extremely painful.
People who wish to drastically limit access to opioids need to know the reality of this kind of pain. Getting out of bed took 10 minutes or more because even one small wrong movement while getting to a sitting position would cause severe back spasms, making me shudder with pain. Walking around my house required balancing myself on walls and door frames.
Eventually I realized my mistake and got a prescription for opioids. The quality of my life quickly and dramatically improved, as within two or three days, the pain was reduced substantially and my mobility and mood were significantly better. I could walk comfortably and hug my kids again.
It’s important to understand that this kind of debilitating pain not only causes unnecessary suffering, it prevents patients from healing. It takes every bit of energy you have to fight it, and your body has little to nothing left to use to heal. Some medical professionals call pain “the fifth vital sign” because of the way in which it matters for a patient’s health. Opioids enabled me to relax, to sleep and to heal.
Four months later, I am almost completely pain-free and have been largely able to resume most of my normal activities. Blood work indicates that my chemotherapy is beating back the cancer. Access to opioids has without a doubt been a key factor in how quickly my health has improved.
The controversy around opioids makes people fear legitimate and humane medication. I can’t get back that week I spent in pain. I can’t erase the experience of watching my kids and the rest of my family seeing me suffer.
Policymaking that ignores the benefits of opioids and focuses only on the drawbacks —as serious as they are — is unacceptably one-sided, and passing such policies will mean that thousands, if not millions, will suffer unnecessary pain and fail to heal as they should.
Tackling opioid overuse may indeed require a serious overhaul of a health care system in which some doctors find it easier to throw pills at patients than talk to them. And when those pills are paid for by third parties, the incentives to use them sparingly are weakened.
But in the end, what medications are appropriate will always best be determined within the doctor-patient relationship, not by bureaucratic dictates and bans. The opioid problem might be real, but unilaterally denying relief to those in pain is a cure that’s worse than the disease.
Steven Horwitz is an economist with Ball State University and an affiliated senior scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
Filed under: General Problems
Sky, you have to find out the name of your Senator’s Health Issues Staffer and write them NOT the Senator. Tell them that because of the CDC Guidelines (which were written by Dr. Andrew Kolodny, a psychiatrist with no training in pain and who has a huge conflict of interest because he owns a huge chain of addiction treatment centers, and other people with no training in pain and who are anti-opiods) AND because the DEA is suing Dr.’s, taking away their licenses and jailing them, NO DR. WANTS TO WRITE A SCRIPT FOR OPIOIDS EVEN ONCOLOGISTS!
TELL THEM YOU WON’T VOTE FOR THEM, if they don’t get out of healthcare AND get rid of Sessions! All they care about is money and power! Also, find out the contacts for mainstream news media, (Fox, 60 Minutes, the morning news shows, and The New York Times, Washington Post, etc.) and contact them.
Call Terry McCoy, a journalist at the Washington Post who is looking for pain patients who have to travel long distances to get their scripts filled, at 202-334-5215.
THE BEST TIP I CAN GIVE ALL PAIN PATIENTS IS TO GOOGLE: WHEN DOES PAIN TREATMENT BECOME PALLIATIVE CARE TREATMENT? BY DR.THOMAS F. KLINE.
COPY THE ARTICLE AND TAKE IT TO YOUR DR. HE CAN GIVE YOU A PALLIATIVE CARE DIAGNOSIS FOR PAIN AND YOU WILL BE EXEMPT FROM ALL THE DOSE RESTRICTIONS AND LENGTH OF OPIOID TREATMENT THAT THE CDC HAS OUT!!!!
And this is one of many drawbacks of govt controlled healthcare. Thats why the govt should not be involved, whatsoever, in our healthcare system…they now have the authority to say who gets treated, and who does not.
Stories like this are being told, yet not much is changing. What more do we need to do? I write my representatives, just to get a form letter about the heroin problem. I write the president, nothing.. What else can we do?