It’s been
four months since I started my series of blog posts regarding how to be the
perfect patient. My goodness, what a slacker I have been! Hopefully you have
hung in with me and have reread the previous posts that I have shared most
recently on my social media. Last week I reminded you about the importance of
knowing what medications you are on. This week, I am going to focus on one
family of medications.
Back in the
mid-1990s, the American Pain Society decided that your health care provider
needed to record a fifth vital sign. After measuring your blood pressure, pulse
rate, respiration rate and temperature, we were told we had to ask you if you were
in any pain. It was felt that the medical community was doing their patients a
huge disservice by not addressing their pain. They told us that we had to ask
every patient, every time if they were in any pain, and if they answered in the
affirmative, we had to find out where it was, how bad it was and how long it’s
been there. The provider would then go into the room, address this information
and treat the patient’s pain.
This patient
might be in for a routine blood pressure check and the chronic arthritic pain
they have in their back wasn’t even on their radar. They had been told years
ago that no one could do anything about this pain. Yet, now, here you are
seeing your family practitioner and now he or she is obligated to give you
something for your pain.
In those first
years of this mandate, prescribing Vicodin or a similar narcotic pain pill
seemed the popular course to take. Until the medical field got thousands of its
patients hooked on narcotics and then had to deal with getting them clean.
Thus began
the prescription opioid epidemic. There were other causes which spiraled this
situation out of control, a whole litany of issues, that I’m not going to get
into. However we got to this point, a large number of people across the
country are popping too many controlled substances. These include not only
those popular pain pills like Vicodin, Percocet and Morphine, but also benzodiazepines
like Xanax and Valium, sedatives like Ambien and ADHD meds like Ritalin and
Adderall. The list of controlled substances is massively long. The most common
way for a medication to get on this list is if there is any potential for abuse. You would be shocked to know some of the
measures people will take to get a buzz off of these things.
So now that
the federal government has figured out that they have a country of people
hooked on prescribed medications, they have decided to make your health care provider
the bad guy, the one who has to try to get you off these meds. Or at least
monitor the situation.
If you are
on any of these medications, for whatever reason, it may not be only your health care
provider’s idea to either cut you off your drugs or make you
sign away your life to stay on them. It is the federal government. I’m just
telling you that.
Now, I’m going to tell you what this means to you if you are
taking any of these controlled substances on a regular basis. I am sure all
clinics are a little bit different, but in general, they are all supposed to be
keeping track of who is taking what, when and why. At your next office visit,
you might be asked to sign a contract stating you will take these meds only as
prescribed, not get them elsewhere, not give them to your friends (or sell them
to strangers). You might also be asked to give a urine drug screen so that we
know you are taking only what you are supposed to be.
None
of this is because we think you are a criminal. We are not trying to “bust” you
and take away your drugs. We are trying to do what is best for you; what is best for you could just be to get you off these meds entirely. But we are
also trying to obey the laws that have come down to us from above.
There is a plethora
of information about this on the internet, but here are just a few websites:
(I’ve tried
to keep my opinion out of today’s article. I’ve tried to share the facts, as I
see them and as I have ascertained them off the internet and from my own clinic.
There is a lot more I could say on this topic, but I think I will cut myself
off here.)
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