Reply to 400,000 overdose deaths in U.S. attributed to Sackler family

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I haven't read the article (I'm currently at work) but this is fascinating to me.

I'm a nurse and trained in the late 90s.  We were told constantly that "pain is the 5th vital sign" and we assessed our patient's pain every 4 hours.  I worked in oncology nursing and I remember how strongly this was drilled into our heads.  Not assessing a patient's pain (and addressing it by getting the doctor to write for a medication) was almost the worse sin a nurse could commit.  I worked at the oncology center at Hopkins from 1992-2002 and I personally sent hundreds (if not thousands) of cancer patients home with an oxycontin prescription.  We gave it out to everyone.  None of us were personally profiting from any of it--the prescriptions were written by interns and residents and the meds were dosed by nurses.  It was just the culture of the time.  [b]Untreated pain (especially in cancer patients) was tantamount to malpractice[/b] and no one questioned how we were treating it.  [/quote]

NP.  I think that has been the case up until maybe a year ago.  Or possibly two.  [/quote]

Exactly. And posters in the emergency rooms from state and federal agencies, reminding patients not only of their rights, but that "pain is an emergency."

It was indeed the accepted wisdom that treating actual pain didn't lead to addiction. I was trained by some pretty wise and experienced physicians who disagreed, and I never prescribed opiods except post op, maybe less than a dozen times, for inpatients.

But I know a lot of docs, and this isn't about kickbacks for the vast majority. I'll buy that there was a strong element of "go away pills" as a PP referenced -- for people with chronic pain who believed meds were the answer, it was a way to keep the clinic moving. (Again, not my practice, but I saw it elsewhere.) But it was in the context of a push that this was Good Medicine.[/quote]

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