I felt compelled.
Check the facts for yourself, the rest may only be my opinion and you are welcome to either dismiss it or not.
Whilst the media storm has subsided, the powers that be have continued quietly and methodically to remove many medications (pain relievers) from use without offering any effective replacement. Because they are "hitting" people one at a time it doesn't get a mention anywhere but here.
I am in no doubt that their policies are destroying peoples lives (those that were managing their pain effectively medicinally) by denying them continued access to the only meds that that made their lives bearable while at the same time causing untold long term harm to those currently seeking treatment for chronic or protracted pain by giving them either ineffective pain medication or none at all.
The issue of imprinted or “memory of pain” pain is well documented and was, in fact, a large part of the justification for the reintroduction of opiode medication use in the early 1990’s. Early enough introduction of adequate pain relief goes a long way to stop this imprinted pain from starting and in some cases can even prevent a cycle of “chronic” pain from beginning in the first place.
Currently we are quoted three reasons for the removal of long term opiode use, one is the opiode epidemic, “American”, (and resulting death rates) and the other is “Hyperanalgesia” and we are shown pretty graphs to support those arguments. The other is a graph of opiode effectiveness over time.
To start with the American epidemic is, to my mind at least, a product of their particular medical system and many (if not all) of their statistics include the illicit use of opiodes in their figures of death and addiction rates. That means that these statistics are completely irrelevant for purely medicinal use purposes but they do sound good, lol.
The other reason, evidence of hyperanalgesia, (to quote medical publications of “dubious” repute such as the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet in 2019) is suggestive (direct quote) at best and (in my opinion) at worst purely anecdotal and since there have been no actual directed and formal studies of hyperanalgesia the information about it comes entirely from studies of people who have “issues” with heroin (and its like) use and are in treatment for that (quoted fact).
Now I don’t know about you but I would certainly call that type of “evidence” dubious and inconclusive, especially when it comes to medicinal opiode use particularly in Australia. However the graphs they show us look nice and help to drive home the so-called facts they cram down our throats. The only graph I was shown that I do not dispute is the one concerning the effectiveness of opiode medications over time although I do dispute the implication that it proves they become completely ineffective. Yes they do become less effective, however the graph’s curve is parabolic, which is to say that while it approaches zero it never, ever, ever, ever reaches it and so the medication never actually ceases to provide relief as was implied to me. The practice of “medicine rotation”, used up till quite recently, helps to alleviate this issue of reduced effectiveness but because of the other statistics I have quoted, the powers that be appear to no longer approve of this.
I ask you to consider all this and do your own research and the next time your “pain specialist” or regular prescriber shows you these graphs or talks about these figures ask them for the actual reference for these so-called facts and graphs. I will be quite surprised if they will give you any at all and if they do I’m certain it won’t be a recognised medical paper or journal they will refer you to. If I am wrong please post the link and enlighten me.
