Doctors charged for exchanging opioid Rx. for sex etc.

[southernhybrid]

Are you able to compregend a simple line of reasoning?

Opium was a major t4ade commodity between Asia and the Brits and America. In 19th century America, Opioid derivatives were part of patent medications. Laudanum. In the late 19th century opium and alcohol addiction was epidemic.\
Anyone who has read Sherlock Holmes would know the character used cocaine.

I am taking about the over prescription of meds by doctors which traces back to the 40s 50swith the rise of suburbia. It is now being called a crisis because middle class people from the burbs are dropping dead.

Back in the 60s it was diet pill addiction, stimulants. But people did not OD. We have a legal and illegal drug culture. We have a culture saturated in drug adds, quick fixes. Heroin was always a problem. In the 60s it moved out of underground cylture into the mainstream white culture. There are parks here in Seattle dangerous to kids, needles laying around.

A kid I knew in high school in the 60s was a heroin addict. I watched him fix.

All this rhetoric in the media is political posturing. Drugs have metastasized in the culture. It is imposable to get rid of the drug problem.

Same as with prostitution. That too goes back far in history, at least to Rome.

As to the OP, when have doctors not abused their position? They are human.

I'm afraid you don't understand the entire picture. About 15 or 20 years ago, the assessment of pain becomes known as "the 5th vital sign". Prior to that many people were vastly under treated for pain. I myself experienced this attitude after I was bitten by a rattle snake in 1975. I used to advocate for some of my older adult patients for pain medications in the 80s when I was a home health nurse, but I was often met with comments like, "she likes that stuff too much". Opioids and benzos were rarely prescribed, and while benzos were commonly used in the 50s and 60s, I don't think they were as common as you seem to think. But, I digress.

When this new concept was initially applied and doctors started to take their patients complaints of pain more seriously, things went pretty well. I began to see people, including my own father, begin to be offered drugs that helped improve their quality of life. But, after several years, doctors and patients took advantage of this. Patients sometimes exaggerated their pain, while doctors, often encouraged by drug companies, began to over prescribe for pain. That's what happened to my friend/former patient. Eventually, these drugs becomes more common as street drugs, and about 6% of people who were offered Rxs. for post op or other acute pain, started developing addictions or simply liked the high and wanted to keep taking the drugs. If you want to bring race into it, the biggest problem is that physicians have always had a tendency to under treat black people in pain, and I would agree that there was less attention given to drug problems in low income minority communities, but at the same time, black folks in these communities who were charged with possession or intent, usually received much more severe sentences than their white counterparts. I know personal examples of this, but we are really off topic now.

Eventually, due to increasing over doses etc. the medical community along with government vastly over reacted, imo, and made it very difficult for those who needed pain relief to obtain it. One example is the law in NJ, which prohibits ER doctors from writing any Rx. for narcotics, at least that's what I've been told my my NJ family. In Georgia, very few doctors are even willing to write Rxs. for pain.

If I didn't understand your last post, perhaps you didn't do a good job of communicating exactly what you meant. And, yes, I am able to comprehend a simple line of reasoning. Do you enjoy insulting people? Here is what you posted:

Staring in the 60d drugs were made mainstream by music and movies. Drugs became cool.

I don't believe it was movies or music that made drugs "cool". Art usually expresses what is going on culturally. That is how I perceive the songs and movies of the 60s that talked about drugs. "Mother's Little Helper" certainly didn't make Valium seem cool To me, the song was about how women felt as if their lives weren't satisfactory, so they were turning to Valium to get them through the day. The problem was there well before the music. Songs about drugs and alcohol go way back, especially songs about alcohol.

Drugs were "cool" long before the 60s. For dog's sake, people were using cocaine at the turn of the 20th Century and opium derivatives were legal in the US until around 1914. Alcohol was and probably is still the most abused drug in the US. I bet most of us have a friend or a relative who is/was an alcoholic.

I don't judge people for wanting, or needing drugs. Humans have always been drawn to drugs. Your earlier post implied that the over usage of drugs was something new, but that's not true. My point was that humans have always been drawn to drugs, going back for thousands of years. Why would it be any different now? And the tv ads for drugs aren't for drugs that have a tendency to cause addiction. Some of the newer drugs aren't any better than the older drugs, but some of them are much better. For example, blood thinners. We could do without those stupid tv ads, but most of them spend more time listing side effects than promoting the drug. Nobody is making doctors order the drugs.

 

[J842P]

I agree that the war on drugs was insane and if it was up to me, I'd decriminalize or legalize all drugs, and instead of spending money on law enforcement and prisons, we could spend money on giving help to those who want rehab. That would be much less expensive. We could also offer people safe places to administer their drugs and help them cope with their dependency.

But, since we don't have that option, the thing that I hate about these doctors, is that their actions, as well as the actions of some of the big drug companies, have made it close to impossible for people who suffer in pain to be able to obtain the drugs they need to be able to improve their quality of life.

If pharmacies, doctors and drug companies hadn't pushed these drugs on people inappropriately, those who needed them, would still be able to received Rxs. for them, without having to be constantly drug tested, and without being treated with suspicion.

Of course we have that option. The War on Marijuana has already been lost. You can buy and sell it in stores in Washington D.C. The capitol has been sacked, and our soldiers are old and dying. It's a matter of time before full, nationwide legalisation. The same can and should (and I think, inevitably will) be applied to opiates.

We already know how to ameliorate the worst societal effects of opiate addiction, and that is to provide addicts with opiates and options for treatment.

Opioid addicts can be functioning, contributing members of society, but not if they don't have opiates, and especially not if we artificially raise the prices of opiates to make them have to resort to all sorts of horrible things simply to obtain them.

The only reason, as far as I can tell, that "we don't have that option" is because people like you say we don't. But that sounds a lot like saying "no, we cannot integrate schools ever, because too many people oppose it. We should just focus on making them separate but equal".

Perhaps you misunderstood me. I meant that we currently don't have the option to obtain whatever drugs we might want to use, legally. I wasn't talking about MJ, which is legal in many states, but remains a schedule ! drug federally. MJ, is safer than etoh and it's insane that it's not legal nationally, but MJ may provide pain relief for a small percentage of people, but it's not effective for many of us. What in the world does this have to do with me? I've supported the legalization of all drugs for decades! Your response to me makes absolutely no sense!


I'm going to meet with one of my former patients in May. We have become friends. She is one of the people who has suffered greatly due to this insane attitude toward opioids. She left the facility where I used to work because of the way she was judged and treated by management. I was her only advocate. She is now going back to her previous pain specialist, who gave her so much fentanyl, that it nearly killed her. She ended up with pneumonia due to the drugs impact on her respiratory system. The doctor never weighed her. She went from 125 lbs to 65 lbs, due to depression and anorexia, which she had a long history of.

I think he is being a lot more careful now. She returned to him because nobody else would help her. She explained to him what happened to her, and I think she now realizes that she was on too high of a dosage of fentanyl along with oxycodone, valium, a muscle relaxer and an NSAID. She realized that her pain can be fairly well controlled on lower dosages of these drugs. This is just one example of how doctors failed their patients, either knowingly or out of ignorance.

You are right, I did misunderstand you. I thought you were saying we don't have the option to legalize/decriminalize drugs, not that they are illegal (thus we don't have the option to do the necessary to properly deal with opiate addictions).

I apologize.

This is one of those subjects that really gets my blood boiling, because the solutions are well understood, but historical contingency plus an overall sense that we "need to punish drug addicts" is responsible for the massive loss of life at this point.

 

[J842P]

Are you able to compregend a simple line of reasoning?

Opium was a major t4ade commodity between Asia and the Brits and America. In 19th century America, Opioid derivatives were part of patent medications. Laudanum. In the late 19th century opium and alcohol addiction was epidemic.\
Anyone who has read Sherlock Holmes would know the character used cocaine.

I am taking about the over prescription of meds by doctors which traces back to the 40s 50swith the rise of suburbia. It is now being called a crisis because middle class people from the burbs are dropping dead.

Back in the 60s it was diet pill addiction, stimulants. But people did not OD. We have a legal and illegal drug culture. We have a culture saturated in drug adds, quick fixes. Heroin was always a problem. In the 60s it moved out of underground cylture into the mainstream white culture. There are parks here in Seattle dangerous to kids, needles laying around.

A kid I knew in high school in the 60s was a heroin addict. I watched him fix.

All this rhetoric in the media is political posturing. Drugs have metastasized in the culture. It is imposable to get rid of the drug problem.

Same as with prostitution. That too goes back far in history, at least to Rome.

As to the OP, when have doctors not abused their position? They are human.

I think what people are pushing back is your claim that drugs "all of the sudden" became part of the mainstream.

Drugs have always been mainstream. They just weren't called "drugs" (which in modern parlance really just means some pharmacological agent that we deem "bad").

Indeed, I think what has happened is that a few drugs like marijuana have lost their absurd stigmas, but the reality is, among the younger generations, drug usage (including alcohol and cigarettes) has gone down.