Pain medications rule my life. Without them I could not function. Straight up fact. I am not talking about a psychological need. I am talking about doing every day things. You know like getting out of bed, taking a shower, getting dressed, feeding my adorable fur babies. Trying to go to the store, working and more. I have been on an ever changing list of opioid drugs for years now as well as an ever changing list of muscle relaxers and others.
I can't understand why some people ( idiots) use pain medications to get high. Where is the high ? I have never felt any euphoric high on them. I have had to deal with the chronic constipation followed by the oh so fun chronic diarrhea. I have suffered from the oh so fun feeling of having no energy because all of these seem to make you sleepy. Let me tell you not a good thing when you are trying to get through a work day. Heck the side effects alone would put off a sane person. I can bet that any of you who have been on them know exactly what I am saying. I have experienced some real fun side effects like extreme muscle pain. Oh yeah just add more pain to my day. I don't have enough as it is.
I am betting that most of you who have been on them have had the fun of growing tolerant to them and needing to change doses or dosing times or even medications. Now that is fun. How do you tell your doctor that these are not working anymore and something needs to change. Apparently telling them that it stops working after 4 hours repeatedly is not the way. That is my current Hell. I am in the unique category of being red headed. I say unique because I am in the rarest group of true red heads, those of us with blue eyes. I thnk it is like less than 5% of the population has this combination. Now it seems that us red heads have issues with anesthesia and pain medications. We develop a tolerance quicker and it takes more to get the same effect as regular people. Some doctors have no clue of this and when you let them in on the ssecret they do not believe you even when you present them with multiple studies from different medical institutions. So with me it looks like I am exhibiting the characteristics of an addict. It does not take long for me to grow tolerant of my new drugs. To give an example. I started taking Roxicodone back in February of 2014. By June I had to hav my dose raised. I had gone through the 8 and 6 hour dosing and it was down to four hours in four months. They boosted me to the next level and went back to 8 hours. That lasted less than a month as they only lasted 6 hours. By October they were down to four hours. Currently my doctor refuses to change my dosing schedule. They say it should be lasting 6 hours. I tell them sorry it is only lasting 4.
Let's be daring and jump on down below the orange jungle gym.
This is a big problem among chronic pain patients. Doctors get most of their drug information from drug reps from big pharma. I bet you have seen them going into the doctor's office. They are the well dressed cheerleader types you see wheeling in the suitcase to the back. They pass out goodies like pens and cups and other swag all bearing the name of their companies latest miracle drug. So the doctor believes what these reps have been telling them. I mean heck why should these people lie ?( If I started to cite all the cases where big pharma got caught telling whoppers we would be here all day.) So they sell the doctor a bill of goods about how this that or the other drug works wonders at curing pain. The doctors then prescribe these drugs to us. The big problem is that even if they did completely scientific studies on the effects, they did not really study the long term usage of them. So they do not know how people develop tolerances or how quickly the average person has before they need to have changes in doses. This is all left up to the doctor and that is not always a good thing.
While working on the patient bill of rights I came up with a wild idea. I say wild because it has never been done and yet to me seems like it would be an excellent tool for doctors and big pharma. Why doesn't big pharma start an anonynous database of schedule II pain drugs ? They could gather usage data from millions and it could be anonymous so people would not have to worry about their data being hacked or stolen. In fact if the data base was accessible to the public everyone could benefit. Drug companies would get real world usage data from us. It would include information like dose ( ie 10mg 15 mg etc) dosing schedule ( ie 8 hours, 12 hours 6 hours etc.) and how long it actually lasts for the patient. I am betting I know a couple reasons why big pharma is afraid of doing this though. First it would show that their time release drugs do not actually last as long as they are touting them to. Second thing is I am betting that they don't want the public to see that generics work as well as their name brand products. I mean heck if generic Oxicodone lasts 4 hours on average and name brand Roxicodone lasts 4 hours on average why would you spend the additional money to pay for the name brand ?
There are a lot of things that could be changed by the database. Drug companies would get some hard facts on long term usage of their medications. Doctors would have a much better guideline than their stomach in deciding when a medication has quit being effective. I am really surprised that no drug company has undertaken this on it's own. Maybe it should be a law. The real world knowledge it offers is tantalizing. Any way you look at it some long term studies should be done. So let's ask all of you. I am attaching a poll below please take a moment and vote. It won't change the world but it will give us an idea of how much promise this has.