The Problem With Opioid Painkillers

There is a problem with our health care system in the way doctors manage a patient’s pain today, particularly endemic to the United States, and this issue is prescription of opioid painkillers. For those who are unaware, opioids are a class of drug derived from the poppy plant, the same plant used to make heroin, and for pharmaceutical company’s morphine, Codeine, Vicodin, and Oxycodone. All opioids bind to neurons in the brain that receive pain called opioid receptors which stops pain directly at the neural level. This is necessary in hospitals when being used for painful procedures that cannot be done without anesthesia, but the over the counter prescription of what is essentially heroin in the form of Oxycodone, Vicodin, and Codeine for everyday use to treat the pain of mass amounts of people has started an epidemic of use and addiction here in the United States. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) “Health care providers wrote 259 million prescriptions for opioid painkillers in 2012” this number is staggering when we see this in terms of yearly constant use by millions of Americans, and this is no isolated trend of increase in prescription, as illustrated by this statistic from the book Popping pills, a drug abuse epidemic, which found that two years prior in 2010 they made “enough painkillers to sedate every adult American with doses every four hours for a month.” This means that people who go to doctors for relief from pain in America are in most cases not given other lighter pain medications or given treatment of the damaged area, but are instead sent home with heroin. This does two things in that it masks pain instead of addressing problems in the body and at the cost in most instances of dependence on the dr...

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... they do not understand the pain content of the lesson, afterwards all children can place true emotion to those lessons you gave and then heal the wounds properly, much as we should with our own instead of drown them and all others in the same sea so many addicts we look upon with either pity or disgust have fallen into. This pain is negative at first but a life numb to it is a life not lived; it is part of us inexorably, it teaches us and gives us awareness of our needs and surroundings. We need not run and mask ourselves from our feelings of pain anymore, we can choose to make ourselves truly whole again. We need to shift from these medications and towards other methods of treatment, because the alternative is taking everything from them, and taking pain from someone is the death of a fundamental piece of them, anyone who have seen its victims know this to be true.