Sorry your niece had trouble getting pain medicine. I hope she’s feeling better.
Am really not a supporter of government intervention in health care. It tends to defy any sensibility.
Like rather than steer those addicts towards this beautiful fellowship called Narcotics Anonymous, whose members would be happy to help them get clean, everyone in more than mild pain needs to be collectively punished by having their access to medication restricted.
IMO The effort to clean up the messes of drug addicts by punishing the rest of society isn’t something they even want. Fellowships like N A don’t involve blaming everyone from the doctor to Walmart Pharmacy in their meetings, but tear down and rebuild the addicts themselves.
They’ll never get clean if they don’t accept responsibility for using in the first place. All this regulation to protect addicts is like politically correct speech—yet more liberal feel good measures that the group being shielded from everything from hurt feelings to self harm doesn’t even want.
An ironically poignant statement considering the time and effort the mental health profession has spent over the last 30 years convincing everyone that drug addiction is a disease and not a character flaw.
I really don’t believe addiction is a disease that just creeps up.
And I’m saying that as someone who about got expelled from college as a drunk, and who used prescription drugs to, at one point, I’m surprised I cleared a drug screen for a new job.
Now that you’ve asked that question, I live in a liberal majority state. But it seems close to no one advocating for “Medicare for All” is black, or anything but white.
Ironically enough, one of the guys telling me from first hand experience the problems with Universal Care in Canada was a black man from Toronto.
Maybe such a Libertarian idea should be implemented here. What you put into your body should be your concern until your choice hurts another (ex. impaired driver or giving birth to drunk or drug impaired baby). Once your choice has ventured into that realm, it should involve legal consequences.
the AMA disagrees with you, they classified addiction as a disease back in the late 80’s (when the war on drugs was really gearing up). That stance perpetuates drug use/abuse, since it takes the onus of the behavior from the abuser and puts it on society at large. Hence the reason Pharmacies such as Walmart are being sued by the DOJ and doctors being scrutinized over their pain management practices.
Not wanting to go off on a tangent, just pointing out the irony.
Because with the surge of covid cases, staff are over-worked and fall behind. Every news report tells us that hospitals are over-stocked with covid patients and under-staffed for the required work. They’re not able to take the next necessary step immediately – for the whole set of patients.
And the linked article doesn’t say anything about this doctor actually being treated like a drug addict. We just have a statement that the woman “felt like a drug addict” because of her treatment.
PS: Your additional point about the current legal overhead for dispensing narcotics just adds to the hospital procedural overhead to get the doctor the meds she needs. Even more so if such prescription isn’t a standard course in covid treatment.
Absolutely! They also overprescribe pain meds for routine procedures. I literally had my wisdom teeth just popped out in less than 5 minutes and the doc handed me a prescription for Hydrocodone. I was like “no thanks, I might just take a Tylenol or two” and gave it back.
I don’t know that she was treated differently because she was black. I also don’t know if she had underlying medical conditions that predisposed her to a bad outcome. I also don’t know if the drug she asked for was in short supply or being rationed.
I do know that many hospitals are overwhelmed, have very busy ERs, a shortage of both physician and nursing staff. Unfortunately, as medicine becomes a less attractive career option, you are going to see a significant shortage of doctors that can only be partially stop-gapped by recruiting overseas medical graduates.
Pharmaceutical companies lied about how easy it is to become addicted to their medications. They marketed them as safe, VERY aggressively. They are highly culpable.
I would not be surprised to see significant increases in nursing schools coming up because of the corona virus, especially once the vaccines are in wide usage. A lot more people are seeing them as heroic figures than ever before, respected more than ever, (at least in recent memory) and people like to be respected. Maybe their working conditions will even improve, but that might be expecting too much given the corporate mentality in health care.
You may be right. But what is trending in medicine is also trending in nursing. While you will always have some schools with sufficient applicants and waiting lists, there are other areas of the country where there are shortages of both nursing school applicants and working nurses. Recruiting nurses is one of the biggest challenges many hospitals have.
In addition to that, just as many doctors are opting out of medical practice for ancillary fields - administration, teaching, medical software design - many nurses are either opting out of patient care for administrative and teaching positions, or taking additional education for more restricted files like nurse anesthetists, midwives or private care. Or they are training for nurse practitioners, which is one of the stopgaps in the fields of basic care - primary care, geriatrics, pediatrics and the like.
Years ago, there had been a founder of medical colleges who had the idea to start medical colleges in more physician poor areas, assuming that the school would draw local candidates who would then remain after medical school to serve the local community. Most of these had to either change strategies, or they never came to pass because most doctors from physician poor areas are more likely to practice where they did their residency or fellowship training than where they went to medical school.
Yep, win/win for Big Pharma and government. FDA approves highly addictive drugs for Big Pharma, which eventually helps government agencies get funding for the War on Drugs.
