Posted by
Andrews on Monday, February 23, 2009 9:09:35 PM
As someone who suffers from chronic pain who already has to deal with accusations of exaggerating his pain to get drugs, I am getting tired of some aspect of the television show House. At first I thought it was unfair to treat a pain patient as an addict, but I was willing to accept maybe he was an addict who also had pain. However, the show simply dealt with it so badly. First, House takes vicodin. They got a name as street drugs from kids with no experience with opiates, but in reality, they are watered down percocet. And as someone with chronic pain can tell you, percocet relieve pain for about 2 hours, especially if you take them regularly. They suppress your CNS for 8 hours or so, but the pain relief is nowhere near as long. So, of course a man in chronic pain gobbles them like candy. I did the same thing before I found a doctor who would prescribe long acting medications.
But tonight truly put it over the top. House switched to methadone, a longer acting medication. (Though my doctor describes it as "intermediate duration", reserving long acting for time release morphine, time release oxycontin and fentanyl patches.) However, the show treated it as if he were sniffing glue. They had him stop breathing, other characters were worried, and so on.
Now, I was taking methadone for over a year. My normal does was 60 mg at the end, but when I had flare ups, I probably took twice that much. And, except for sometimes falling asleep at my desk late at night, I noticed no side effects. I certainly never stopped breathing. Methadone may be a moderately strong narcotic, but it hardly the demonic substance they portrayed. (And that doctors would so strongly overreact to something so common in the treatment of chronic pain is laughable.)
We who need pain medication have enough problems. We are already pretty much presumed to be addicts until we prove otherwise. We have to jump through hoops to get medication, and when we do, the feds periodically crack down on doctors, scaring them into inadequately prescribing. We definitely do not need the popular media presenting the idea that we really are secret addicts and that normal pain relievers are terrifying substances. (I wonder what would happen if House were to change to the time release morphine I take now? Would his head explode?)