Opiate Pain Medication

Believe it would be. Doctors are also humanbeings.

Hello, I am from Arizona and I too was on high doses of opioids and because the government said my pain was what they said it was and not what I said it was in so I was taking off all opioids and put on a pain pump which was not as effective as I had hoped because it was not systemic taking care of all of my chronic fibromyalgia, new pain back pain and everything else. So I have been taking off that and given a patch which is not working either and I’m very frustrated with the entire Pain medication problem because doctors cannot prescribe these medication’s that I need you have to see a pain specialist which mine is two hours away and I find the whole thing disconcerting, annoying and not fair. So I know what you’re going through because the government is wrong.

Part of the problem with opioid deaths is when people cannot get their pain meds from their physicians they go to drug dealers and we don’t know how or what is in those medication so people die because they overdose on illegal gotten medication so the government needs to understand we need pain medication that is localized, made by reputable pharmacist and they would not be opioid deaths

Hi
I’m sorry to hear of your husbands Chronic Abdominal pain.
I have first hand knowledge of the situation with opiates. What you were told is generally correct.
The CDC has issued federal guidelines placing limits on the prescribing of opiates. These limits are called Morphine Milligram Equivalents or MME. Unfortunately the DEA has used these guidelines as a tool to prosecute, delicense and in some cases jail Drs. Who violate these guidelines by prescribing opiates to patients at higher doses than guidelines state.
This has created fear amongst pain management Drs so many of them have simply decided to lower their patients prescriptions until they meet the CDC guidelines.
General Physician or Internists or principal care Drs. in many cases have decided that they no longer will prescribe any meds at all that are classified as a Controlled Substance like Xanax.
Bottom line is what you heard is accurate.
Good Luck to you and your husband.
Kind Regards
Bob

A neurosurgeon, who I am seeing, states that ones age affects the effacy of a pain pump. He does not recommend it for older people.

The deaths from purchasing narcotics from your street side pharmacist is about 3X times higher than deaths from prescribed medications when used as instructed. A side note about drug dealers. Many times they are the only source for medications in many poor neighborhoods.

Does your neurosurgeon offer his/her reasoning behind the blanket statement that the older one gets the less efficacious a pain pump is?
Seems like a gigantic broad brush . It may or may not be true but I would need a much more specific response before I accepted that correlation.
Bob

That was his professional opinion. He felt the narcotics in the pain pump has extreme side effects on older people. Other than that anyone's guess is as good as mine.

I was addicted to opiates for 9 months. Don't like being addicted to anything--never smoked when it was considered SOO uncool in my generation not to.
Please don't dismiss CBD (non THC marijuana) if you haven't tried it. We're not talking about your youthful toking here.
I have had "juvenile " arthritis for 60 years. Degenrative discs at both ends of my spine. Every joint in my body hurts. Botched knee surgery that caused my leg to break and have to be put back together with plate and screws and never fully recovered. A hernia that caused my stomach to migrate up against my lungs and had to be moved and anchored. And four colon surgeries with removal of a length of the colon PLUS sepsis in the hospital and now a tortious colon that can spasm and give me sudden pain. I've been dealing with pain and searching for relief all my life.
CBDs work. You just have to find the right one and the right dose. They were the only thing that allowed me to get off the opiates.(That and my caring doctor who kept writing prescriptions as I tried to find the CBD products that would help.)
As I detailed another place in Mayo, I currently use Tommy Chong's Night and Day formulas. Tinctures that you take orally. Nothing in them gets you high--just nano technology that offers relief and the best sleep I've had in years. I also use Nightingale Remedies CBD Relief Cream--topical, no THC, but includes MSM to cross the skin barrier quickly and also a dozen natural herbs that offer pain relief. And because some studies have shown that CBD actually works better with a little THC, on very bad days I use Gron gummies. I don't take this if I'm going to drive but on bad days I mostly want to stay in bed anyway.
I tried dozens of CBD products before I hit on this combination that works for me. But I couldn't live without them now--my quality of life so much better than it was.
Hopefully there are others who want to take a less passive approach to finding pain relief, so it isn't helpful to dismiss CBDs. They work well for some of us.

I don't dismiss CBD or any particular drug and I wouldn't. I was onlybaddressing the difficulty doctors are having now in legitimately prescribing any drugs that 'might' (by the government) be considered possibly habit-forming. I had mycoplasma pneumonia and whopping cough and, in order to prescribe 48 hours worth of hydrocodone, the doctor's office manager had to file paperwork to 4 different government websites. And the prescription could not be called into the pharmacy. It had to be printed and taken, by patient no less, to the pharmacy. And we had to try 11 different pharmacies to find one that had it in stick. So, there I was, with a fever of 104, taking my feverish self to a pharmacy that did not have a drive-through window, exposing everyone to the germs I was carrying, just to be able to get a cough-suppressant so I could maybe sleep through the night. I had been sent to the ER earlier in the day but the hospital lost the admitting papers and sent me home, with a then-temperature if 104.5.

The state's prescription laws made unnecessary work for the physicians, intolerable inconvenience for patients and loved ones and have so far not dented the illicit drug trade. I feel for people in chronic pain whose access to life-saving pain help is being restricted by stupid laws passed by those not suffering themselves. I read a comment once wherein a physician referred to 'the tyranny of the healthy' who don't always understand the lives of those who aren't so lucky. I think that policy makers and politicians can be guilty of that myopia.