Painkillers, Heroin, and the Road to Sanity by Joani Gammill

Author:Joani Gammill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-09-26T16:00:00+00:00

Alternatives to Abusing Painkillers

Although different organizations offer numerous recommendations on ways to treat pain and addiction, many of these suggestions are not very helpful because they are time consuming. Addicts need to take a lot of time in exploring alternative ways to treat their pain and medical conditions, and managed care gives doctors very little time. So what sounds good in theory is many times hard to pull off in reality. You, the addict, have to be your own advocate, and I know this is hard if you are not in the frame of mind to stay clean. You need a doctor to help you, but we are so hard to read and so good at what we do—feigning pain and illness. It is a complicated issue.

For example, according to a study of pain management by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) released in October 2011, roughly 116 million people in the United States have chronic pain, but no one knows how many of those people are addicts using the legal system to feed their addictions. The NIDA study reported, “Estimates of addiction among chronic pain patients vary widely, from 3 to 40 percent. This variability is the result of differences in treatment duration, insufficient research on long-term outcomes, and disparate study populations and measures used to assess abuse or addiction.” 44 I conducted my own unofficial research by sitting in dozens of pain management waiting rooms during my days of active addiction. I chatted with lots of folks and traded tricks with some of the people I met on what to say to improve my odds of procuring the narcotic I was after. One addict can measure up another addict pretty quickly, and those waiting rooms are habituated by a lot of addicts.

The NIDA study on pain management goes on to say that it is imperative to take a long history from a patient, looking for a personal or family history of drug abuse or mental illness. I almost laughed when I read that. What addict going to a doctor’s office looking for narcotics is going to tell the doc his good old dad is a crack addict or his sister shoots dope? There is a wide divide between theory and reality, but we must keep trying.

I think this theory is far easier to put into practice: monitor the patient for drug-seeking behaviors. A patient with an addiction will make up excuses, like saying he lost his prescription, or the whole bottle he had fell into a toilet. Today, many doctors who prescribe opiates will accept this sort of excuse from a patient only one time. Also, many doctors require their patients who are on opiates to sign contracts stating they will receive their medication only from them and use only one pharmacy. This is easy to get around if you don’t use insurance, although some pharmacies no longer accept scripts for opiates that do not go through insurance. I understand that in theory this can slow down

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