Pain is Really Undertreated in Our Society

"How many need opioids but don’t get them? Those numbers are hard to come by, but “pain is really undertreated in our society,” opioid specialist Dr. Christopher Evans of the University of California, Los Angeles, told the NIH meeting."~ AP Story on MSNBC"

This recent AP story is supposedly about the development of abuse-resistant painkillers but the quote above found about midway through the article makes its clear that its not just the drugs that are the problem. I do not doubt that there are legitimate cases in the US where people who really need opioids are denied them because of financial, insurance, or bureaucratic reasons. But in a society where one can limp to a doc-in-a-box and proceed to walk out with a pain medication script, sometimes twice in the same day, I find it hard to believe that pain is really undertreated in our society. I know of people with chronic pain that rely upon these drugs to restore a measure of the quality to their life; this is not an attack on them. It is more of view from the other side of the fence, because clearly the sources used to develop this AP story were medical, professional, and well intentioned but just slightly out of touch with the real world.

Read the review by clicking on the “Read More” below…

There were statements that seemed inconsistent:

The good news: Only a tiny fraction of patients who are appropriately prescribed the most powerful painkillers — drugs known as opioids, including morphine, Vicodin, fentanyl and Oxycontin — ever will become dependent on them.

And then…

At the same time, prescription drug abuse, particularly of opioid painkillers, is on the rise. One in 10 high school seniors admits to popping Vicodin for nonmedical purposes, and recent studies suggest about 2.2 million people age 12 and older first abused painkillers in the past year, outpacing new marijuana users. Some 415,000 people received treatment for painkiller abuse last year…

Now I know I don’t have a doctorate, but does it really take one to see the correlation between widely available prescription pain pills and the global surge of their abuse? There was a quote by an apparently well grounded doctor named Dr. Pamela Palmer, the director of pain research at the University of California in San Francisco.

Dr. Palmer laments that the only way now to tell how patients are using painkillers is “making people pee in a bottle to see if the drug I prescribed is in there.”

Why my dear Dr. Palmer, you have hit upon the very idea I have been suggesting for years yet you make the practice of drug testing sound barbaric. I mean after all, many companies require drug testing for employment and some schools are even requiring their students to drug test in order to participate in extracurricular activities. Would it be the end of the world to drug test patients before they are given pain medications? Even if they test positive for suspected abuse, they could still receive treatment just much more closely monitored.

Now the article does go on to summarize some innovative treatments for pain that may be available in the future, but what about now? Peeing in a cup may not be ground breaking research, but IMHO I think it would help curb the rising rate of people becoming addicted to prescription pain pills.