One thought on “A Heroine Against The Insane Drug War”
As I’ve said in here before, I’m disabled. It’s from fibromyalgia and arthritis. For these maladies I take a LOT of prescription drugs. A few years ago the state Medical Board set up a system where anyone who was taking drugs in heavy doses for chronic pain was required to see a Pain Management Specialist. Most of whom were Anesthesiologists with little or no one on one patient background.
They set up this system (read that as, travesty) to keep people from scamming the (stupid and overworked) Primary Care Physicians. (stupid and overworked is the boards attitude, not mine) And also to keep the bad primaries from selling scripts outright.
But here’s the problem. Actually just the first one.
Not ONE person was EVER prosecuted for doctor / scrip shopping and not one doctor was ever prosecuted or slapped for selling scrips. However, this new system HAS created a bottle neck for those of us who DO need the drugs. There just are not enough pain specialists around. It’s a pain in the @$$ getting out of one practice to another if you don’t like whomever you are seeing. And those specialists know they’ve got you by the nerve endings too, IMHO.
Here’s the other problem.
I recently left a practice that was the second group I’d left. (I left the first group because they wanted to treat JUST the rich and well dressed…which left me out on both counts!) I left that second practice because they were always overbooked and I had a problem with their bookkeeping practices. (somehow, with both Medicare and private insurance paying them for me, that group STILL found a way for me to owe them $10 per visit. The ONLY specialist to ever get there BTW)
But the real reason I quit going there was the ‘patients’ who they saw. I overheard enough of the conversations there to know that the majority of the patients are either scrip junkies or are seeing multiple pain doctors under different names to get LOTS of drugs to use or resell.
One ‘family’, a husband and wife and the wife’s mother, I saw there several times. They were driving up I-95 from SC, about 70 or 80 miles, one way. I’ve often wondered just how many doctors they were driving past, or actually seeing along the way, to be driving 160 miles round trip, the three of them, to get pain meds.
I now from looking around at stories on the interweb and reading news stories that some of my pain drugs can go for $10 to $15 per pill on the street. That one bottle is worth about $1K to $1.5K for the 90 pills I get per month. I could make, or anyone could make, one hell of a good living selling pharmaceutical grade drugs at that rate. And I think some are ding well.
So with more doctors in the loop, more money passing hands and more bureaucracy involved for all the tax payers to cover, the situation here is worse not better and people are still in pain.
The people in pain part is OFTEN lost on American Medical Professionals. They are often way more involved in the legal and ethical aspects of drug treatment, than in the people in pain aspect.
And in the middle of the night, when everyone is asleep and you’re in pain, and you’ve had 6 or 7 hours of sleep over 3 or 4 days, the last thing on your mind are the ethical or legal considerations of the medical community.
There are a few people out there who get it, Siobahn Reynolds was one of the people who did. Many of us who knew who she was get it that she will be missed.
As I’ve said in here before, I’m disabled. It’s from fibromyalgia and arthritis. For these maladies I take a LOT of prescription drugs. A few years ago the state Medical Board set up a system where anyone who was taking drugs in heavy doses for chronic pain was required to see a Pain Management Specialist. Most of whom were Anesthesiologists with little or no one on one patient background.
They set up this system (read that as, travesty) to keep people from scamming the (stupid and overworked) Primary Care Physicians. (stupid and overworked is the boards attitude, not mine) And also to keep the bad primaries from selling scripts outright.
But here’s the problem. Actually just the first one.
Not ONE person was EVER prosecuted for doctor / scrip shopping and not one doctor was ever prosecuted or slapped for selling scrips. However, this new system HAS created a bottle neck for those of us who DO need the drugs. There just are not enough pain specialists around. It’s a pain in the @$$ getting out of one practice to another if you don’t like whomever you are seeing. And those specialists know they’ve got you by the nerve endings too, IMHO.
Here’s the other problem.
I recently left a practice that was the second group I’d left. (I left the first group because they wanted to treat JUST the rich and well dressed…which left me out on both counts!) I left that second practice because they were always overbooked and I had a problem with their bookkeeping practices. (somehow, with both Medicare and private insurance paying them for me, that group STILL found a way for me to owe them $10 per visit. The ONLY specialist to ever get there BTW)
But the real reason I quit going there was the ‘patients’ who they saw. I overheard enough of the conversations there to know that the majority of the patients are either scrip junkies or are seeing multiple pain doctors under different names to get LOTS of drugs to use or resell.
One ‘family’, a husband and wife and the wife’s mother, I saw there several times. They were driving up I-95 from SC, about 70 or 80 miles, one way. I’ve often wondered just how many doctors they were driving past, or actually seeing along the way, to be driving 160 miles round trip, the three of them, to get pain meds.
I now from looking around at stories on the interweb and reading news stories that some of my pain drugs can go for $10 to $15 per pill on the street. That one bottle is worth about $1K to $1.5K for the 90 pills I get per month. I could make, or anyone could make, one hell of a good living selling pharmaceutical grade drugs at that rate. And I think some are ding well.
So with more doctors in the loop, more money passing hands and more bureaucracy involved for all the tax payers to cover, the situation here is worse not better and people are still in pain.
The people in pain part is OFTEN lost on American Medical Professionals. They are often way more involved in the legal and ethical aspects of drug treatment, than in the people in pain aspect.
And in the middle of the night, when everyone is asleep and you’re in pain, and you’ve had 6 or 7 hours of sleep over 3 or 4 days, the last thing on your mind are the ethical or legal considerations of the medical community.
There are a few people out there who get it, Siobahn Reynolds was one of the people who did. Many of us who knew who she was get it that she will be missed.