Scripts | 1. A Hard Pill to Swallow
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 ก.ย. 2024
- One medication could help end the opioid crisis. Why are so few people taking it?
This episode is the first in a new three-part miniseries from Radio Atlantic-Scripts-about the pills we take for our brains and the stories we tell ourselves about them.
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MAT saved my life. Sublocade is one part of my recovery. I do therapy, substance abuse counseling and work a 12 step program and living in a sober house. But I will tell you insurance would rather cover getting you addicted then cover the drugs to help you get clean. I’ve had to deal with this myself.
@All the gaslighting, you can stand 😢
Let me tell you, from one recovering addict to another. MAT will keep you a slave to big pharma. I detoxed many times using MAT (methadone or suboxone). The withdrawal getting off those meds are worse than heroin. They age you quicker too. Please do yourself a favor and taper off them. You are at the mercy of your next script. Traveling, working, going about your life will all depend on that next pill or strip.
As an older person experiencing daily pain, I have resisted taking most any medication, but my quality of life is decreasing. I often wonder what to do, how to talk with my doctor. To her credit, her first question to me every visit is how is your pain level? I grit my teeth and say I'm ok, don't want anything. But every visit I wonder what I'll say and how she will perceive it. It seems like a choice I will someday have to face, how poor can I let my quality of life get before I allow myself to consider opioids? NSAIDs make my stomach bleed so my choices are limited. It seems like a one way road, yet my last years can be more comfortable, perhaps?
This audio report was put together very well. I like many others have chronic pain issues and am prescribed opioids after an accident. Not every opioid user should feel guilty if they are using their medication as prescribed. I think some people are really prone genetically to addiction while others aren’t. I view my pain as if it were a piece of chart. Medication only accounts for 25% of how I deal with my medical problem. The other 75 percent include exercise, diet, acupuncture, chiropractor visits, etc. Medication should never be used as a cure all because it’s not. The patient has a role to play in their health as well, not just doctors
It is _absolutely_ a cultural thing, with roots going back to the first "patent medicine" quacks of the 18thC. It's the consumerist belief that good health and well-being can simply be _purchased_ like a commodity... instead of being a complex thing, that depends on providential factors like age and genetics, but also requires self-discipline and lifestyle balance.
Couldn't agree more two years ago. I was sentenced with diabetes. I had no such problems before my six months hospital stay
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
You can't just throw meds at a problem. Healing from addiction is a multi-faceted process. You need bio/psycho/social approach without shame and stigma.
It's our diversity they keep saying is good. It only means taking a white county and eliminating whites. That creates a crash and collapse of social norms increases in crime, a lowered standard of living, and a bankruptting of the county. Of course people will be stressful and depressed.
@nicolinadoe6427 Western medicine isn't about healing. It's about treatment. How many different pills can they shove on you .
Doing therapy is part of medicated assisted treatment. Suboxone is only one part of it.
Why are we focusing on “the individual” and an increasing prevalence of mental illness - and not equally on its dialectic, the society within which illness occurs?
Rhetorically; Is mental suffering (before even entering DSM definitions) _really_ endogenous to the individual - without exogenous relations to social normatives at all?
Wouldn’t real human progress occur if both the individual and the communal aspects are integrated? Or, are we (still) convinced that treating (changing by external means) the individual is scientifically all we can do?
Just wondering…😊
Well the DSM is based on a “bio-social” model which assumes a complex interaction between brain disease and social institutions. In public discussions we reasonable focus on the social causes but doctors still have to treat the individual.
@@kalliaslands9938 I know, but point missed… This is a bit like political practice vs social sciences. We “make policies” based on what goes into a spreadsheet and law, while sensing (feeling, intuition, observing, experiencing) that “something” is always missing. Ask friends & family…?
I point to how we end up externalising the holistic context in the process of “being in control” by endless reductionism. At the same time, we seem unable to visualise how to actually progress (socially, civilly) within the most obvious boundaries - mostly created socially (at a group level). The individual sense of “stuckness” can’t emerge without what we’re “stuck against”.
Way better (some also empirical) takes; Iain McGilchrist, David Graeber, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Nate Hagens…
@@musiqtee
as an ex heavy drinker(addicted) here, have you ever been addicted to alcohol or drugs?
I've gotten sober & stayed sober for a year here, 2 years there, (3+ yrs sober being my personal record) but then
I would relapse, with devastating results.
so for me addiction is not theory, I had to be personally motivated to not only quit alcohol, but more importantly, I had to find a real life method/solution for me not to relapse, and it has to work today, because I can't guarantee I would survive another relapse,
the solution for me was A.A, but A.A. is not something that everyone wants to commit to or stick with, the other factor that was a life changer, watching Eckhart Tolle videos, the ones where he teaches methods for observing my thinking, watching the voice(s) in my head & regularly monitoring what's going on in my head, not tring to control the thoughts or use willpower or won'tpower, but just being aware of the thoughts & questionable beliefs that I used to cling to & act on or react to. this regular practice, & prayer &/or meditation is what keeps me, so far, out of relapse, dehab & retox.
This was a great video. Suboxone is basically trading street opioids for dr. Prescribed pharma opiates. Addiction is a horrible existence!
Do you consider people with chronic, debilitating, intractable pain, addicts? For example someone who takes an opioid three times a day and functions normally and has a good life and is not abusing the drugs-are they an addict? Some medications do have a place. Like insulin for a diabetic, opioids have a place in allowing for someone to live a full, productive complete life without having to stay in bed all day. I also find issue with the word opioid interchangeable with illegal heroin fentanyl etc. It's not interchangeable. Illegal drugs are just that illegal, prescribe opioids like Norco are just that, legal medication that worked for decades.
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻No $ to be made on those prescribed pain meds compared to those forced to find illegal alternatives
Except there’s no difference. Fentanyl IS a legal life saving med. It’s used in medical places like hospitals and allows medical prosecutes and treatment of pain conditions that would otherwise not be possible. The issue is the war on drugs. Making safer things illegal forced people to use harder things.
@@sbocaj22 I agree. But the fentanyl that’s on the street is not the legally safely manufactured fentanyl. It is aftermarket so to speak. Garbage. And I agree the war on drugs is a miserable failure.
So much ignorance in one post. Research the words opioids and opiates, they are a type of drug that covers drugs that activates the opioid receptors in the brain. Also search dependence vs addiction. Dependence can't turn into addiction easily, just get your supply cut off.
Your distinction between legal and illegal doesn't matter, that's all a social construct that varies worldwide. Rather look at what's natural vs what is manmade.
Back in the early '90's, my 5 yr old son was forced by his kindergarten teacher into getting a diagnosis of ADHD and a script for Ritalin, which he hated taking bc it "hurt his tummy" and "made his heart beat weird," not to mention kept him from wanting to eat his snacks and lunches! He figured out how to hide it under his placemat at breakfast at home, and how to fake swallowing it and spitting it out outside the nurses office, until in 2nd grade, the older kids started trading him for their cigarettes in the boys bathroom! When I discovered his tricks (bc the teachers could tell when he wasn't on it), I stopped giving it to him and enrolled him in a karate class instead🎉😊
This got me right in the heart. How do we change the (false) stories we keep telling ourselves about addiction and about addicts? When will we see they are not “others” they are us.
As an American, I do not "love my drugs". They're expensive!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I love groceries more than medications.
Thank gosh
Extremely multi faceted topic great choice. It’s really interesting how things have gotten to this point. Above all if I had to give one reason as to why it’s come to this I think it’s cause we have the “luxury” to be this way
How about severe chronic pain? 😢 thanks to the opioid cult, I've been frozen out of any pain medication, I take over 3000mg of ibuprofen a day just to function,
I'm sorry to hear that. Your liver probably is also. I feel your pain.
It seems obvious that opioid use and abuse is impacting the United States far more than anyone is interested in addressing. This crisis affects every aspect of our society from these very personal tragedies to national politics. This is clearly revealed in this reporting. Many younger people enter into addiction by way of their elders with prescriptions. When insurance, scripts & out of pocket money run out, they turn to the street. For many young and old they quickly find oral opioids on the street are far cheaper and easier to obtain than they ever imagined. If it’s a hard sell to help a young person who wants to end their use, how much more so for older users who find themselves dependent for what began with legitimate concerns.
I wonder how many addiction programs are resulting in OD deaths 😢
Good question Richard.
@EnvironmentalCoffeehouse When I was frozen out of pain control and my doctors tried to assign me to an addiction program, I was ready for suicide
My goal is to find out since my recently deceased 32 year old son, Jason, was thrown out of his sober house and onto the streets for relapsing day one out of rehab, started with prescription Klonopin, then he went to the street and his certificate will say fentanyl, except in my opinion, he was legally medicated into addiction and mentally incapable of making good decisions.
Timely, necessary content
Excellent presentation.
And how about when it comes time to stop...the severe withdrawal from these agents?
It wasn't too bad, I tapered off of it after taking it for 12 years and I felt like crap for a couple weeks, but after a year of not being able to sleep I decided to get back on it.
@@bezillions That sounds like it was actually really bad if you weren't sleeping for a year lol
@@buddysyst3m That was a problem I had my whole life that partially got me into opiates in the first place. But the subs allow me to sleep as normal. I didn't think about all the things that they actually help with on a secondary level, where for me it just makes way more sense to be on t hem. But physically, I was only "in withdrawal" for a few weeks. Now, I've quit Xanax cold turkey before and THAT was unreal and almost killed me. I was in full withdrawal for over a year too, my whole body felt sunburned for over a year.
jeez, can this phenomenon have anything to do with the deeply sus interdependence of healthcare & good old american hate-stage capitalism?
_dear lord bless muh economy, oh you better saints & angels, please guard the sacred flow of commerce that inspired our founders to establish this great nation to lead the universe in general awesomeness_ 🙏✨️💸🦅🗽
AWWWW MENNNNNN (but seriously tho…I agree 💯)
Pain is real. Denying pain meds to people in pain because someone else abusing it is just inhumane. You have no idea how many of us are out here living in pain… hanging on by a thread.
With even a fleeting look at US society and the drug use numbers all make sense.
This is so important. Thank you. I can't believe how similar my story is to Mallory's. 😢❤
California State prisons have many inmates on maintenance methadone for years and years and years, which is just crazy! The pharm companies just love that taxpayer money.
Thank you for this
Suboxane is a horrible approach to addiction recovery. Addicts replace their high with it. Ive seen it time again in treatment scenarios
Isn’t that the goal. Success rates for abstinence are abysmally low. Pushing it as the only route will probably help a few reach a more disciplined fulfilled life while condemning many more to dysfunction and fentanyl OD. Having people not die and contribute to society seems like a worthy enough goal even if it does not mean getting rid of an addictive personality - how many of us even without addiction are really able to consciously change our personalities?
@@kalliaslands9938 not when they act like addicts and it makes them high anyway
@kalliaslands9938 not when they act like add!ct$ to get it and it makes them h!gh
@@kalliaslands9938 replacing one poison with another is not the answer
The American dream, you have to be asleep or doped to believe it 😢
We've pathologized normal.
I live in OKC and I am on buprenorphine. It has worked great for me but Im always worried about what the long term effects are on me.
Feared a drug could be used as a drug. Right .
Pills off the street? About 10x more expensive 😢
It's economic. People who are high earning with great benefits get great healthcare. Meanwhile,poor people in worse shape are called drug seekers are pushed out the door. Because as any healthcare professional will tell you poor people aren't profitable. The American healthcare system is completely broken and greed is the root cause.
I have lost relationships to a wife and son over this crap.
I am so sorry Jed.
@@EnvironmentalCoffeehouse thanks Sandy!
We are medicating a lack of American culture other than capitalism. Being constantly targeted for a sale takes a toll
Agree 💯
Mallory's disdain for "meth heads" like she's any better than them is pretty solid cognitive dissonance. Also, as someone who's suing Indivior for ruining my teeth, she won't be able to since she publicly admitted her teeth were already messed up , good job Mallory.
Those class action lawsuits are very selective as to whom they allow into the suit, and it's very difficult to meet their criteria, even if you'd been on suboxone for 20+ yrs and have acquired the inevitable gum and tooth decay from it!😮😢
@@carynmartin6053 There's a lot of garbage wanna-be law "offices" like Saiontz & Kirk screwing over people. My lawyer is on the actual stearing committee of the Multi-District Litigation, and I just so happened to et referred to her from another lawyer I had reached out to after Saiontz and Kirk screwed me over. Luckily I didn't give up and I'm successfully filed in the lawsuit.
Recovering opiate addicts are definitely generally a better adjusted and more normally functioning class of people than the meth heads. And that's not just opinion, it's backed by science. When you get clean from opioids you can make a full or "complete" recovery. Whereas, meth does permanent, irreversible damage to the brain. People get clean but you can still always tell they were a tweaker and they never fully regain their faculties.
We Americans like a quick and easy fix to our problems. We’re impatient and lazy, unwilling to do the hard work and sacrifice necessary for a permanent solution.
I don't think you have any idea what some of us are going through. No one I know is looking for a quick fix. We're looking to get back to a more normal life, which with our system can take years..
Couldn't bother with even stock footage or b roll 😅
Oh the Atlantic finally cares about its readers? Lmfao nice try media psychos
Bet two of my toes that the writers of this were on plenty of these. It's only from the mind of a drug-riddled upstate millennial that these "drug beats another drug" ideas come from. Not everything has to be a free-market solution.
Older millennials are approaching their 40s so not a great target for “dang kids get off my lawn” sentiment. I think you mean gen Alpha and Gen Z. Get with the times my man.