When A Prescription For Pain Pills Becomes A Gateway To Addiction : Shots - Health News : NPR

On the surface, the 39-year-old construction worker looks like any other patient with back pain. He came to the Washington, D.C., emergency room, where I work, in severe discomfort after moving heavy cinder blocks a few days before.The pain gets worse with twisting and bending, but he has no numbness or weakness in his legs. There's no tenderness along his spine, no difficulty urinating, no fever, so there's nothing to suggest a fracture, infection, spinal cord mass or anything other than a muscle strain.The resident I'm supervising orders a Percocet pill, a sensible option we choose almost every day. But the patient refuses when the nurse offers it to him.That's strange. On an average eight-hour shift in the ER, I see dozens of patients in pain. Sometimes, the pain is caused by a chronic condition like arthritis. Other times, it's an acute episode of muscle strain or a broken tooth.Every patient in pain wants relief from it. Often, people ask for narcotics by name: Percocet, Vicodin, oxycodone and Dilaudid.I was curious why this man was the exception. "That stuff messed me up bad," he tells me. In his early twenties, he'd had a similar episode of back pain after heavy lifting. Doctors prescribed opioid painkillers. He soon found himself addicted to them. He went from doctor to doctor to get prescriptions, then turned to buying drugs on the street. It took him 10 years to get clean.His first exposure to narcotics had been in the ER. I can imagine myself as the well-intentione...
Source: Psychology of Pain - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs