surgeon and a healer — what I wanted to be — but I was also writing
prescriptions for narcotics. And I was writing refills. And I was spend-
ing time trying to wean patients off their medications, because 20%
were popping them like Jujubes — very early on showing signs of
dependence, abuse and addiction. Plus, I was getting calls at all hours
of the day and night, and had to be concerned about patients calling
me on weekends.
Not anymore. Now, 5 years later, I'm still a healer of knees and
shoulders, left and right, but that's it. Not because I don't care about
my patients. I care deeply about them. But because, thankfully, we've
figured out how to manage and minimize pain, so that they — and I —
no longer have to worry about whether opioids might ruin their lives.
It's important to remember just how this profound and deadly opi-
oid crisis came about — how it is that 4 out of 5 heroin users started
with prescriptive opioid medications.
It happened because we succumbed to misinformation and an
absurd proposition. The misinformation we were fed was that opioids
are inexpensive and non-addictive. Both of those assertions turn out
to be patently false. The absurd proposition was that we could and
should consider pain a vital sign, and that we had to make sure our
patients were completely pain-free. We were told, in fact, we would be
graded on our work. Pain would be quantified on a 1 to 10 scale, and
if our patients weren't zeros or ones, our hospitals could be penalized
and our satisfaction ratings would surely plummet.
And yet we all knew that the notion that pain is objective and meas-
urable is ridiculous. We can objectively measure blood pressure, pulse
rate and oxygen saturation. But pain is subjective. One patient's 3 is
another patient's 5, or 7 or "worst pain of my life."
And as for opioids being cheap and safe, little could be further from
the truth. They're highly addictive. Twenty percent of patients who
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