‘Entire Body Is Shaking’: Why Americans With Chronic Pain Are Dying, NYT [trigger warning - discusses suicide]

USA focus. Some interesting comments.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/...aTWd6vtv7mUy4D-cSRgkt2VKRl4fXm&smid=share-url

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1610386274812051459

 

That sounds par for the course.

 

Can we just give people with intractable chronic pain as much drugs as they want? They're in pain for heaven's sake. (That's slightly hyperbolic.) I see multiple arguments in favor of liberalizing the rules around painkillers:

• Doctors/policymakers are demonstrating a basic failure to apply the golden rule here
• People with chronic pain have the right to make their own medical decisions, including making tradeoffs between comfort and the risk of dependence according to their personal values.
• Distorted evaluation of outcomes. Forcing people to kill themselves, not because of despair, but because it's the only way to end their pain, is implicitly acceptable. A few people becoming addicted to drugs is implicitly treated as more tragic.
  
• We're treating molecules as the problem here, not how people use them.
• Treating addiction as a moral failure. It's not.
• Addiction would not be nearly as tragic if we had extensive harm reduction.

 

Meanwhile, we are currently in the golden age of psychosomatics, with all chronic health issues, including pain, having been reframed as behavioral problems that everyone could avoid if they weren't so stupid and just thought differently and exercised a bit.

Not a coincidence.

Just as it is noticeable that there is talk of a growing crisis of mental illness, real or misleading, right alongside massive growth of mental health care and awareness. More money is being put than ever into "mental health", billions and billions every year, and yet somehow outcomes appear to be getting worse and worse. At least according to the mental health care industry, whose only conclusion is that more money and research should go their way.

Also not a coincidence. Conceptual errors guarantee failure in outcome. You get the same level of failure as framing poverty as spiritual failure.

 

Not every community has a pain medicine practice, but that's where I'd suggest chronic pain patients try to get a prescriber.

Here's an earlier article about Ann Fuqua

https://www.painnewsnetwork.org/stories/2020/12/2/help-us-end-the-suffering-of-chronic-pain-patients

 

I have read a few things recently, both in articles and novels, which I have found appalling. They go like this - someone has become addicted to antidepressants or painkillers, they tried to get "clean" but kept relapsing because the pain or depression returned when they stopped the drugs.

That used to be called medicine.