08.01.09
Bitter Debate Vilifies Physicians Who Prescribe Narcotics.
An ER Physician breaks his silence, and explains the subtle influences that forces the hand of many doctors to inappropriately prescribe powerful narcotics, like Morphine. Doctors have a ethical obligation to reduce or remove suffering, so when a patience who is in “Pain” or claims to be doctors find themselves at an impasse.
Since pain can’t be measured, it can be almost imppossible to figure out with absolute certainty whether the patients Opiate Needs are legitimate or simply just a ruse - intended to feed an addiction. This conundrum has caused many doctors to become scene as villians, victims of the under/over opiate prescription dilemma.
Carol said,
August 1, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Physicians ARE villians when it comes to prescribing pain killers. And you can throw Dentists and Pediatricians in the fold too. When CNN Headline News broke the story about Broward County FLorida cracking down on Pill Mills today (August 1, 2009), I wanted to jump for joy. A proposed National Drug Monitoring System is the only way we are going to get this Thing, this Destroyer of Lives, this National Epidemic fixed. My adult daughter got hooked on Vicodin within 3 weeks from a “retired anesthesiologist” who set up shop in a mall in Elgin IL. She wrenched her back on a coffee table and a neighbor referred her to this guy. Around the same time, her husbands testicular cancer came back and with 3 very young children and a house in arrears, she depended on Vicoden to help her cope and good old Dr. Malters kept giving them to her like candy. By the time we found out, she had doctor shopped her way through most Illinois pharmacies to support her 30 pill-a-day habit. She even took her husband’s morphine while he was dying. Now, 8 years later, after her husband’s death, and her incarceration for writing prescriptions on pads idiotically left for the taking in doctor’s offices, we are all living with her illness. She has been on Suboxone for the last 5 years and it has made her into an 85 lb. non-functioning vegetable who feels no pain, no hot or cold, no bitter or sweet, no right or wrong, no nothing. Suboxone is 100 times stronger than Morphine and that’s the Cure! Florida is behind 23 other states who have imposed drug prescription monitoring, maybe because all the doctors hightailed it there when things got hot, just like Dr. Malters did when Walgreen’s said was the biggest prescriber of opiates in Kane County IL. Maybe Michael Jackson’s death has brought the drug monitoring movement to light. If that’s the case, I want to award him the Medal of Honor posthumously. Suboxone and Methadone have to be on the list of monitored narcotics though because thanks to George Bush and his DATA 2005 legislation, any doctor with 8 hrs. of video training can now have up to 150 patients on these drugs. How ironic that John Walters, the Drug Czar under Bush is now speaking about the national monitoring system when his own boss has enabled the problem to spread to epidemic proportions. I have witnessed the parade of zombie’s just like my daughter in 4 different Doctor-Donor offices pick up their prescription without ever having seen the doctor. For now, watch out Dr. Malters, the Broward County dogs are coming for you.
Carol
Relapse Prevention said,
October 9, 2009 at 3:18 pm
Its a difficult problem because addicts have figured out how to manipulate doctors into getting these prescriptions for heavy narcotics and there’s no way for the doctors to really determine whether they are genuinely inpain or just lying to get some drugs.