[vkou]

A friend's wife underwent brain surgery ~8 years ago. She was prescribed pain medication for a long while.

At some point, she realized that she may be developing a bit of a pill problem. She went to her doctor, to see what could be worked out.

He listened her out, marked her down as drug-seeking, and cut her off, cold turkey.

Surprise, fucking surprise, the very next thing she did was to turn to black market oxy.

Eight years of rehab, rehab again, fighting, bargaining, threatening, and pleading, she's once again relapsed, and their marriage is falling apart.

I speculate that if it does, she'll likely be dead in a few years.

[imtringued]

Doctors aren't allowed to help people to recover from drug dependencies. If a doctor opens a clinic that gives people access to non contaminated drugs with a dosage that is controlled by a trained professional then it will be shut down because people get jealous that their tax money is spent on keeping junkies "high" when in reality the dosage gets lowered successively until no adverse health effects remain and the "high" almost completely disappears but still satisfies the dependency enough to prevent them from seeking out black market drugs. What most of the population also fails to realize is that the health effects of black market drugs are almost trivial compared to the financial damage they cause which has a far greater impact on the lifestyle of that person. You don't become a criminal or a prostitute when you spend $50 on "medication", but it's pretty much guaranteed when your "medication" costs you $1000 per month. For most people that's the difference between being homeless or not.

[hestipod]

I've been through that over and over with doctors turning hostile and outright lying and am going through it again now after the worst year I have ever had pain wise. I never took a LOT by any measure, in fact very small doses just to get by, and only about half of the days in any given year as I cycled off and when situations were calmer. I have avoided seeking stronger things offline and will off myself before going there as its costly in every way and has no good outcome. I have a sensitive corpus it seems and can't take a lot of any medication, a built defense against massive addiction I am thankful for in a way, or else I probably would have ended up like some of the worst victims in a gutter using heroin. But I guess in the end what does it matter if you cannot get better anyway. Ultimately people just want to stop hurting and don't care about people's politics...and when it gets like this, and doctors and society and families are so hostile and blaming, the only plausible thing becomes stopping the existence that hurts.

[mindslight]

The whole situation is already the product of too much left-brain imperative thinking, but I have to wonder if a basic suit for medical malpractice would have legs. The doctor in question essentially got her physically addicted, and then when told of the symptoms, unilaterally chose a wildly inappropriate "treatment" which exacerbated that addiction.