She'd been on 60 mg of oxycodone daily (Percoset) for chronic pain, for about 8 years. The admitting physician refused to write for the oxy because he disapproved of chronic opioid use.
This is a horrible story, Going, and totally, totally unethical of this doctor.
There are so many stories like this in prisons, where the psychiatrists and other physicians enable the addiction and thwart it. Now, there are broad classes of medications which in my State are banned altogether for use in prisons because of so-called misuse by patients, when the issue was the prescribing of them indiscriminantly, and of course, selling of them, for profit. I must be honest.
So crazy things happen. Like no benadryl for sleep, so that people fake psychosis to get heavy drugs that as a side-effect cause drowsyness, when cheap relatively safe benadryl would better do the job.
Oh, Going. How I hate that story of your friend's last days. And thank g-d you came along.
Copa, are at high risk because you like the high.
Yes. Going, you may remember, my Dad used drugs, when he could get them, but never became a nodding off junky. I do not know why. He was a terrible alcoholic. But he always worked. He was even under suspicion for trafficking heroin when he was a merchant marine.
I know who I am, and where I could go. I remember.
I think the difference between dependence and addiction is subtle and hard to understand for me. I agree with Insane, palliative care, I am in favor of. And aggressive, if desired by the patient and family.
I understand dependence to some extent, because I have taken sleeping pills and xanex and vicodin and while the sleeping pills were presented to me as not leading to a physiological dependence, I felt a psychological one, and could not sleep without them. I hate that.
But there is a netherland where dependence becomes addiction, I think. Where the element of free choice becomes nullified, because of free choice, and addiction flowers. I say that because I believe there is individual responsibility with respect to medications. Looking back, I believe I could have been set up by physicians, unknowingly. I see more free choice now, that comes from taking responsibility.
Believe me, I am not judging here. I am owning up more to who I am--or more to the point, could be.