You may (or may not) have heard of a class of drugs called opioids. These drugs are commonly prescribed to patients to relieve their pain after a surgery or if they are experience a chronic pain. These drugs are fantastic (as most drugs are) at making the patient feel great, however, they have one serious side effect; they are ridiculously addicting. This begs the question, “Should these drugs be used?” They are highly effective at treating the pain, but are the risks of addiction worth it? Is there something we can do to get rid of the addiction?
If you were to ask me my opinion on this issue, I would tell you to stop using opioids to treat pain. “But Brandon, why wouldn’t you use them in moderation? Or do research to relieve the side effects?” Right now, in the medical field, there are “regulations” on the prescription of opioids, but it still seems to have no effect on the problem as doctors are still handing them out like candy, and people receive an excess of what they actually need and could sell them on the streets to addicts. Even if one doctor turned down your request for a prescription, you could just as easily go and see another doctor and ask them. All in all, I don’t feel that regulation is a good solution to the problem at hand. As far as the research goes, I do see this as a possibility. There is currently research being done on opioid receptor antagonists and how they prevent the addictive property of these drugs, but in the end is it really worth the effort? To me, I see much more prevalent areas of research among medicine and drugs rather than working with pain killers. As I see it, pain killers are for wimps. Before you get mad, let me explain myself. Think back to a time way back when people didn’t go to the doctor to cure their minor pains. They weren’t prescribed opioids and thus didn’t get addicted; they just sucked it up and dealt with their pain. For more major pains, we have other pain killers which aren’t addicting such as NSAIDS (advil or aleve) which would help the patient cope with the pain without addiction side effects, which to me is worse than the side effects of NSAIDS. Therefore, I feel our government research money can be spent more responsibly.
As you can see, opioids can have great success in treating our pain, but in my opinion, we should just stop using them due to their nasty addictive nature and switch to using a “safer” pain killer option such as NSAIDS.
Vicadin! Codeine! Oxyconton! Oh My!
