@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?🧵

https://twitter.com/JessLynnMoreno/status/1535316984765861890

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...

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...

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...

@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 ...