Wednesday, July 25, 2018

Coming to the Clinic - part 6


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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