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> People with chronic pain will be sitting there looking comfortable, normal HR, eating and walking and watching movies comfortably on their iPads. Are you really a doctor? It's hard to believe - if you were, you should know at least how the chronic pain works, how devastating it can be, how it destroys people's lives, all the while without (most of the time) making them scream and cry (or have elevated heart rate). The chronic pain works not through how severe it is (although it can be really severe at times), but through it being chronic: it's with you non-stop, never leaving you, you can't forget it, you can't do anything about and - which is the worst - you know it won't end. It's easier to cope with the pain if you know it will subside at some point, in a week, in a month. It's incredibly devastating to know that there is really no point in you trying to bear the pain because all it gets you is more, not less, pain tomorrow. It's incredibly hard to even imagine what the chronic pain feels like. Chances are you are mostly healthy, and the pain you experienced was temporary. You can't, at all, use such experiences to try to understand chronic pain patients. If you want to understand it, go break an arm. Wait for it to heal a bit, then break it again. Rinse and repeat, for years. Then, try to live a comfortable, fulfilling life and come back to tell us how it went. Chronic pain patients can look alright on the outside. Especially if they are on a good painkiller, but even if not, they can look perfectly normal... for a time. They develop coping strategies and generally do their best not to show their pain when in public. You can limp for a while with a broken leg, too, before passing out. Yet, if you observe the same patients for a whole day or two, you'll see a lot of signs that they do, in fact, suffer a lot. Don't dismiss it just because some of them manage to look alright when waiting for an appointment. --- Another thing is that I don't understand what is wrong with taking opiates, at all, other than the risk of overdose, which would be non-existent if they were legally available. From what I've read, very few overdoses are intentional, most happen because people are getting fentanyl when they expected oxycodone (actually, it's crazy that they use fentanyl to fake oxycodone - it's like trying to fake coffee with amphetamine...). The less-potent opiates and opioids (basically oxycodone and tramadol), which seem to be fuelling the crisis, have a lot fewer side-effects, including mood-altering high, than morphine or heroin. I don't see a reason for banning people - even healthy ones - from using them, other than some almost-religious conviction that people "should live clean". If there's something I'm missing here, I'm all ears. |