There has clearly been over prescribing of opioids, but we should be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I have used opioids for years. The key is to use them only when necessary.
I have an artificial heart valve that requires I take blood thinners, I also suffer from chronic arthritis from my neck down my back most likely do to a combination of having played football through early college until injuries caused me to stop and exercising excessively after giving up football to keep off the weight (with limited success). I asked my cardiologist whether there were alternatives to opioids, he said not yet.
I am watching to see if drug testing eventually establishes CBD as a possible safe alternative. If it is determined safe for people like me than there may be another option. In the meantime, I was blessed with a tremendous career, that allowed me to retire at 48 (when my heart condition began to interfere with my work). Eventually, open heart surgery corrected the condition, but from that point on aspirin and NSAIDs were no longer pain relief options.
Over the years, I have tried steroid injections, physical therapy, acupuncture, exercises, massage therapy, stretch routines, etc. You name it, I tried it and to be fair most provide temporary relief, but the more effective options are quite expensive over time.
What does work really well… is rest. Lying flat for half an hour or so provides relief for two to four hours. Even better with a little heat or ice (heat relaxes the muscle, ice reduces inflammation). So being retired, I am lucky to be able to lie down twice a day for around thirty minutes and that gets me to evening. If I am home for the night, I simply relax sometimes with a heating pad where it hurts. But if something demands I go out for the evening, a mild opioid dose mixed with Tylenol gives me the relief necessary. I say relief, since it is not that the pain goes away, it really does not. It does diminish the pain and for some reason the opioid causes the pain not to “bother” me.
So after all these years, how many pills am I up to. Around one to two a week. Never more than once a day. But access to opioids does allow me to enjoy nights out one or twice a week. On vacation, I swap my night pill for a midday pill so we can be out all day without lying down and then I rest when we get back to the hotel after an early dinner.
Why am I writing this. Well for three reasons. First, if like me, you need opioids for a normal life, then I hope we don’t throw the “baby out with the bathwater” by making access to them near impossible. Second, for those who use them for a long term chronic condition, have a strategy to use them as little as possible. If your usage increases figure out how not to change your routine to use them less. Third, with all the money devoted to pharma research, we really do need to explore new and less addictive pain relievers for those that can’t use pain relievers that have blood thinning as a side effect.
Finally, I had hip surgery this year and I was prescribed the same opioid for post surgical pain except I was told to take one pill every 4–6 hours. After two days, I decided the pain was better than the side effects of being constantly on opioids. In a post operative review, I indicated that most hip patients were quite use to some pain prior to surgery and so less opioids should help them feel better sooner than being in a fog under opioids.
My point is that opioids do have side effects and minimizing their use even when you use them to treat chronic pain is a good idea. In the case above, I decided one pill prior to going to sleep was all I needed for the third through seventh days after surgery and after that I was back to my one to two pills a week routine. I recommend ice or heat where possible and when you are at home, that is almost always possible.
