This is potentially very good news, via @Nephthys0xa. As with so many pieces of potentially good news, I'll believe it when I see it, but it's at least a place to start.
And now—try to contain your shock—a rant.
Do not respond to this post with bleatings about the "opioid crisis" or "alternative pain management" or "pain acceptance" or a link to a study sponsored by the makers of Tylenol. Seriously. Do not.
Over the last decade or two, I have watched several people I love, some of the people closest to me in the world, suffer from chronic pain. I have watched it chip away at their physical and mental capacities. I have watched it drive them to risky self-medication. I have watched it eat away at their very sense of self. I have watched it nearly kill them, and in a couple of cases I'm still not sure it won't.
I have also watched them get prescriptions for safe, inexpensive, easily available pain relief which dramatically improved their lives ... and then have that taken away. This is a story repeated millions of times. An almost unimaginable act of cruelty, made routine and mundane.
Listen to me very carefully.
A drug category like "opioids" which includes everything from tramadol and codeine on one end, to fentanyl and oxycodone on the other, is clinically meaningless. It may be chemically and biologically accurate. It may help us understand pain and the body's response. It may even be useful in new drug development. But it is not and never will be a guideline to what medication to give a patient who is actively suffering, right here, right now.
The blood of the thousands of people who deliberately committed suicide, who drank themselves to death, who overdosed on street narcotics, because they just COULDN'T TAKE THE PAIN ANYMORE—is on the hands of the people who decided to use the "opioid crisis" as an excuse to inflict agony on their fellow human beings, under the guise of concern.
So is the suffering of millions of people still living, every day, forever.
Those caring physicians and pharmacists and educators and regulators should be consumed with horror and self-loathing. They should know themselves for what they are, and take the possibility of undoing some tiny fraction of the damage they've done as their only motivation for staying alive themselves. They should beg for forgiveness, and accept whatever measure of it they get as unearned grace.
Of course they won't.
If anything I've said above makes you angry or uncomfortable or want to raise your hand and say "yes but" or "well actually" ... that's your problem. Go take a long look in the mirror and sit and think about what you've done. Then try to do better.
End of rant. I have work to do.
@medigoth @Nephthys0xa I'm curious. How are you able to make such long posts? Mine is only limited to around 450 characters. That's not bad by any means, but nowhere near what you're able to do.
@DynaSore @Nephthys0xa It depends which server you're on. I think the default Mastodon limit is 500 characters, but some servers have much longer limits. Qoto's limit is 60k characters, which is much longer than any post I'm likely to want to make. Markdown support is also really nice.
You can contact the Fosstodon admins and ask them if they'd be willing to add those features, or just adopt Qoto's code wholesale. IMO any server dedicated to science topics should support both long posts and real formatting.
@medigoth @Nephthys0xa I see! I'm fine with my current limit. Still much better than Musky Bird's character limit.
@medigoth
I am, for the first time in my life, taking an 'opioid' for intense pain.
The stigma is real.
When I need to refill a prescription, I feel some how guilty; and sadly, I feel the same way when I take my pills.
I try my best to avoid taking anything; but, that is not always a great option.
I've watched plenty of people become dependent on pain meds; but, until you are there, you don't truly know what it is like.
I've run low on characters; so, end of my own rant.
@medigoth @Nephthys0xa Just my own point of view: Opioids are a pharmacological tool, nothing more, nothing less. Like any other class of drug , they are disparate in their pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics, carry both benefits and risks, can do both harm and good and are useful and indeed essential when applied thoughtfully. They were used excessively in the eighties and nineties, with resultant mass iatrogenic addictions in context of an industry-influenced medical culture that trained physicians to underplay their risks—and then were demonized in the oughts and tens, leaving patients at the mercy of illegal and unregulated narcotics. High rates of opioid addictions and deaths have resulted from the inability to acheive a balanced approach in the use of these drugs.