Opioid Painkiller Prescribing
Where You Live Makes a Difference
July 2014
http://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/opioid-prescribing/index.html?s_cid=cdc_homepage_feature_001
From the article:
259 M
Health care providers wrote 259 million prescriptions for painkillers in 2012, enough for every American adult to have a bottle of pills.
259 MILLION… a pretty large number !
There are a estimated 116 million chronic pain pts… so it is common knowledge that the DEA has limited all controlled meds to a 30 days supply… so if all of those 116 million received adequate therapy.. would result in 1.4 BILLION prescriptions in a year..
So if you presume that half of those 259 million Rxs were for acute pain.. leaving 130 million Rxs for chronic pain…
Divide that number by 12 Rxs/person/yr and you have abt 10 million chronic pain pts getting routine opiate therapy..
So continuing that presumption… only 10 million out of a 116 million chronic pain pts.. suggesting that <10% of chronic pain pts are getting adequate/routine therapy.
YES WE HAVE A EPIDEMIC… of NON-TREATMENT !!!!
Filed under: General Problems
Your math makes sense. And people wonder about suicides? If one is concerned about another they would not want a life of suffering. I certainly would not wish it on anyone. Yet the government actually believes it is being fair by causing pain and suffering. But I do have to include some Doctors and pharmacists in the category. Just discrimination.
Everyone says we have a Opioid Epidemic here in the U. S. but in order to have a epidemic we need something to compare it to, like an outbreak of a disease that spreads quickly . Maybe we just have a huge increase in population ,especially the aging baby boomers that played hard when they where young, you all know what I mean when I say played hard.
Back in the early 1990’s I knew of 5 woman and 3 men that doctor shopped getting the same scripts from these so called doctors that ran pill mills .I will call these type doctors ,Scripters because they don’t deserve the title Dr. or M.D. behind or in front of their name. These doctor shoppers picked up the same 3 scripts, Hydrocodone 10/500 , Soma and Xanax every month for a very long time. It depended on the drive one had as to how many Scripters one of these pill mill shoppers saw each month. Most saw around 6 pill mill Scripters because they had to pay the Scripter cash. That’s the cash they got from selling these pills for $2 a pill back then. And the rest of the pills they kept for their own bad habit. I knew of one pill mill shopper that went to 16 pill mill scripters a month. I told this person its just a matter of time your going to get caught by going to so many pharmacies , your going to mess up by mixing up the pharmacies. 3 months later this very thing happened and they where busted calling the wrong pharmacy asking if their script was filled and they just went to that pharmacy picking up the trio of medications.. The pharmacist caught on and called the pharmacies near them and found indeed this person was picking up the same scripts .
Every last person accept for one that doctor shopped that I knew of has now passed away from overdose. Only to be replaced by a close relative to keep the supply going. Now they can longer doctor shop its all over because the DEA put a stop to it, it took them long enough but never the less its over.
This was before the Time Released medications came about.
Why am I telling you all this, reason is the Opioid Epidemic is really something our government just caught on to just 4 years ago, maybe longer ,its been there this entire time. Yes the Time Released meds added to the problem but these doctor shoppers could not afford to buy these time released pain medications it just didn’t work out that way.
The Opioid Epidemic is now fabricated by certain entities and its not as bad as they make it but the media has blown it out of proportion and the general public thinks its out of control problem and its not. People who truly suffer from chronic pain illnesses cant get their scripts filled and its terrible to make innocent people suffer like this.
I’ve been a chronic pain sufferer for many years and this problem finally caught up with me just 3 months ago not being able to get my one script filled. So just to be on the safe side I’m titrating down and have found my chronic pain is not much different. I’ve lived with this chronic pain for so long my body has adjusted to this life of chronic pain. So I think I’m done with this mess and I want out but need to be careful in case my chronic pain becomes worse with age and during the winter time my chronic pain almost doubles. But I truly hope and pray those with uncontrolled chronic pain get the help they need , I know all to well of this life of pain.
But hope can be paralyzing ,like waiting for a missing or abducted person to come home. I lost a loved one 20 years ago as of last July 4 th and its the worst pain I’ve ever felt thinking what happened to her, if someone is harming her or if she is still alive. Pain comes in all kinds of ways but this pain of a missing loved one is the worst I’ve ever felt.