>situation and what your mother is going through: But would
>you not prefer that your mother remain alive?

I want two things for my mom:
1)To be alive
2)To have a quality of life that does consist of agonizing to medium pain for every waking moment of every day.

Frankly I can see how someone might want to be dead if their life is nothing but pain.

Note:My mother has months and even sometimes a year where she is largely pain free and she does not take the opioid drugs. Believe me - she stockpiles the unneeded/unused medication for the times when pain does hit because many times it can take days to see a pain specialist and have medication prescribed.


>Because, from the government's perspective, it's my
>understanding that the most troubling outcome of this opioid
>issue is the staggering number of deaths resulting from
>"accidental" overdoses.

I think these overdoses occur mainly for people without severe and chronic pain - plus my mother is a nurse.

So if the pain medication is not as effective she doesn't take MORE - she takes what she is prescribed and then calls the doctor to get other treatments.

One such treatment are epidurals - another is switching the type of opioid - she's been given a Fentanyl patch for time periods where the pain was unmanageable without it. And there's still a lot of other drugs in the opioid family that are still stronger - they're usually reserved for hospice care/cancer treatments.


>Clinician practices have been linked to the skyrocketing rise
>in accidental overdoses.. such as overprescribing, either by
>quantity or by dosage. Which makes sense... because pain is
>not a new phenomenon, and pain medication is not a new
>phenomenon.. but somehow, the rate of patients dying from
>accidental opioid overdose tripled in a decade. I'm not
>denying the involvememt of addiction, and pain as an
>experience is still an area of research with huge gaps that
>remain to be understood. But there are definitely systemic
>forces contributing to the problem, which I believe is what
>the government is trying to address with the type of
>intervention described in the article..

Yes, if you have a minor pain or a transient pain (break and arm and the pain goes away after a month) and take the stuff and keep taking it when the pain is gone and then keep taking it for fun then have to increase to get the same high then you'll probably overdose.

That is not the case for a lot of people with severe and chronic pain.

Now figuring out if the person is truly having severe chronic pain or just faking it to get high or to not start withdrawals is an issue. I'd error on the side of letting someone without pain get high - not by having someone in pain stay suffering.


>So just wondering if it is possible to consider the heightened
>regulation as a way of actually protecting your mother, too?

This all *depends*. If the regulation is from bureaucrats (and I'm not using that as a Republican swear word - I mean people in the FDA who do not practice medicine and have not treated real chronic pain patients) then I think they'll do a lot of harm.

if it means having protocols in for doctors and pharmacists to aid them in determining who needs pain medication and who might be abusing it then I'm all for it.

And prosecuting doctors who are overprescribing to get rich - lock them up too.

But I know , because I've had to drive my mother to appointments when the pain was too bad for her to drive, that what's really happening is the FDA is trying to have FEWER people given medication and it often affects those who actually need it.


>I understand how sensitive this topic must be for you, and I
>hope I haven't offended you by asking, for real


Drug addiction is a real problem - but so is pain management.