@ApprissHealth:.So those of us with inoperable skeletal defects or incurable chronic diseases like Sickle Cell Anemia, who have zero chance of any quality of life, career or healthy family relationships w/o opioid medications, are "abusive" due to the nature of their disease?🧵
Where, exactly, is your data to back up these cruel and insupportable statements?
How do you plan to "deploy" this analysis, & what recourse do patients have when they are harmed by the actions of healthcare professionals who uncritically rely upon it in their decision...
...to force patients off legal and appropriate medications?
Patients with these conditions are being slowly & tortuously euthanized by know-nothing technocrats, who somehow think an algorithm will straighten us right out: that spines held together soft-tissue-shredding...
...hardware, femur heads shaped like anvils, or erythrocytes shaped like scimitars slicing apart blood vessels and organs don't cause pain, but only emotional weakness to be dealt with by tough love & prohibitionism.
I was on 90MME of oxymorphone for more than 12y, because I...
...am unable to stand or walk without it due to necrotic femur heads crushed, and a left trochantar squeezed into a head of cauliflower, by a spica cast in 1966 (this treatment was abandoned by orthopedists due to this long-term damage within a decade). The cast was to treat...
... complete hip dysplasia: I was born with 🚫 left hip socket, and my left femur head firmly lodged in my abdomen. My pelvis is twisted & misaligned, left to right, top to bottom and front to back.
In case you don't understand anatomy: a hip replacement won't fix all that...
... Only opioids allow me to function, as my misshapen bones & misplaced muscle attachments cause every step to further drag threadbare tendons across that knuckled trochanter, pulling my vagina 1" to the left, & causing my labia to feel like they're entrapped in lobster claws...
... Appriss's "Prescriptions for Abusive Patients" is an absolute obscenity; any physician, hospital system, HMO or incorporated medical practice which uses its "definitions" to determine treatment of patients in unremitting, high impact, moderate to severe #ChronicPain is...
... guilty of de facto malpractice.
But *I* an the one abusing the medical system, by merely existing, and by expecting *not" to be medically abandoned to live in misery,
isolated from family & friends, for the last 20-40y of my life?
... understand the abuse of patients you have suborned, by failing to stop the misapplication of your 2016 Guidelines, when you were repeatedly warned of the neoliberal hellscape you had created?
My last CDC comment was generic & addressed medicine & law - so I could put my name on it.
This one's about my experience directly, & it's anonymous for obvious reasons. Apologies to you for maxing out length (@CDCgov earned EVERY. FUCKING. WORD.):
I was able to secure safe self-help meds last week, after 14 months bedridden, sleepless, & in severe pain, post-INVOLUNTARY opioid taper. I am now physically functional (opioids help function >pain, but they are about 50% effective against my bone & soft tissue pain); however...
...however, I am now experiencing waves of suicidal ideation unlike any in my 44yrs of chronic pain, or 20+ yrs on opiates, b/c:
The thought that I could lose access, AGAIN, and be thrown down into that hole of solitary confinement & exiled from family/friends/community, is ...
The part of opiate palliation that no other med can replace: FUNCTION.
Opiates do *not* evaporate pain (a very good day for me was a 50% reduction), but they somehow eliminate pain as a subconscious consideration in moving through your day.
Of course, then you have to be...
...careful not to overdo it, but *that's* a reasonable cost of admission to whatever it is you want/need to do.
Without meds, pain cannot be an ancillary issue: it's Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, front of mind all the time & haunting your every move...
Making dinner is an endurance event, & drafting an email as focus-exhausting as defusing a bomb.
Medicated: the pain's there, but more like an annoying earworm. It'll pull my focus a few times an hr, & maybe make me do something to change the dynamic - like changing position...
@BCBSM@BCBSM, here are 3 reasons you've misrepresented the correlative, NOT causal, relationship b/t opiates & suicide:
1) You combine "suicide" with "OD" without acknowledging the role of illicit fentanyl in the non-suicidal, unintentional fatal ingestion of drugs for either ...
@BCBSM ... recreational or un/under treated pain, when the etiology of both cannot be generalized under these disparate circumstances;
2) Any #chronicpain or #cancwr pain patient who has been on ">wkly" opiates over at least the last year, & who committed suicide (did not OD) had ...
@BCBSM ... likely chosen suicide b/c their pain could not be managed after a forced taper, and their physician could no longer be trusted to look out for the patients' best interest rather than reacting to coercion from insurers like BCBS of Michigan; and, finally,