We’ve talked often before about how many people who addicted to drugs — especially legal prescription drugs — got that way through irresponsible or uninformed medical treatment. People who have suffered accidents or required surgery end up addicted to the medications they were told would make them better. That in itself is a travesty and a crime against all ethics of medicine, but it goes even further.
Every one of my patients is different and individual, but when they come into my office they all tend to have a lot in common; there are, broadly speaking, a limited number of situations that would cause a person to seek the kind of specialized addiction treatment I provide. One of the common scenarios I see is a patient who’s received opiate pain medications from a doctor, legally and with no problems, for a while — sometimes a few months, sometimes years. Then, suddenly, that physician can’t or won’t write their prescriptions anymore. I’ve seen patients whose primary care doctor has written their scripts for years, then suddenly gets involved in a malpractice case and stops prescribing out of fear of scrutiny. I’ve seen patients whose surgeons suddenly get panicky and cut off their medications cold-turkey. Some doctors claim this is for the patient’s own good, to get them off the medications, but this kind of “detox” can be severely harmful.
These patients often end up with me because they are desperate. There is absolutely no system of any kind in place to help people whose doctors have been over-prescribing. When one of these doctors is caught, or is threatened with punitive action, they stop writing opiates altogether and the only result is that all of their patients go into withdrawal and, almost inevitably, their quality of life plummets.
I talk a lot here about how doctors need to be better educated about the risks and benefits of pain medications, and how stricter measures to control dosages are often necessary. But we can’t impose these sorts of top-down limits on healthcare providers without also building some kind of bottom-up system, some kind of safety net to help those they have been harming transition into a healthier form of care.
I see a lot of patients who, after being misled and mistreated by the medical system, then slip through the cracks when the problem has been “corrected”. It needs to stop.