Abstract:
Doctors are tasked with the important job of keeping people healthy and alive; however, in their never ending pursuit of that goal, their good intentions may have life shattering consequences. There is a slippery slope when it comes to prescribing pain medication and these doctors need to ask very tough questions. The pressure of this delicate situation is immense and when coupled with the responsibility of caring for the dozens of other patients they have could lead to physician burnout. Simply prescribing the pain medication may seem like the best option for both patient and doctor. But in the end it may not be so simple.
Over the last two decades, opioid abuse and overdose has increased drastically and this correlates with the rise of opioid prescribed painkillers given out by doctors. Intentional or not, prescribed opioids can be the gateway to a life of drug abuse and relapses, but the blame is not with the physicians entirely, for they just want to help those in pain. Nor should the blame be placed on the abusers themselves, for they have simply fallen victim to the psychological and physiological disease that addiction is. With my short stories I hope to shed light on how random factors such as socioeconomic status, social support, and the environment can turn a patient into an addict.
I was inspired by my own experience dealing with pain killers and the stories I would see on television that showed the transformation of a young athlete into a drug addict after experiencing a serious injury. My sources include two ethnographies over the opioid epidemic and the doctors prescribing the medication, the Surgeon General’s guide to dealing with the epidemic, as well as several first person stories of individuals who have gone through and overcome opioid addiction. The last set of sources I will not be taking quotes from directly, but I will use them to guide my characters and my stories. I have created two parallel stories with the intent of showing how the different environments that people are exposed to are major factors in establishing their predisposition to addiction. I also wanted to make aware that the majority of opioid addiction started with prescribed painkillers. I want to try and alleviate the unflattering bias people have towards drug addicts.
Introduction:
Opioids are natural or artificially synthesized chemicals and when they interact with opioid receptors on nerve cells in the brain, they can reduce pain intensity. Opioids come in many forms both illegal and prescribed, which are generally safe when taken for a short period of time; however, because opioids produce euphoria, they can hijack the brain’s reward system causing individuals to want to take the drug over and over again. This hijacking ultimately leads to opioid misuse and addiction. (The U.S. Department of HHS). Opioid addiction is a deadly epidemic that has plagued the United States. According to The U.S. Department of Health and Human Service, in 2016, 115 Americans, on average, succumbed to overdose and with each passing year this number seems to increase. The unfortunate truth is that the gateway to opioid addiction is not the prevalence of street drugs but the hundreds of thousands of painkillers that are medically prescribed each year. In 2014, 30,000 deaths occurred due to overdose of prescription drugs and by 2015 2.1 million Americans were suffering from prescription painkiller addiction (Hamm). Although the physicians are the ones making the prescriptions, they are not necessarily at fault. Doctors are under the immense stress of caring for the dozens are patients they see in and out of the hospital every day. When a patient comes in with chronic pain or has just undergone surgery, the doctor does not have the time to assess whether the patient is inclined to painkiller addiction nor can they truly feel their pain. These factors ultimately lead to the overprescription of pain medication (Webster). Doctors are not necessarily at fault and neither are the people experiencing addiction. Opioid addiction is a disease with 3 stages that creates a debilitating cycle of drug dependence. The U.S. Surgeon General Jerome M. Adams said it best when he stated that “opioid use disorder is a chronic but treatable brain disease, and not a moral failing or character flaw” and understanding that is the first step to ending the opioid epidemic.
A Tale of Two Fates:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1XDZQsvUcsAsxo02dHRjtui0I8prnWYJ9V_1UBm6jxek/edit?usp=sharing
Works Cited
Baudinet, Bridget. Clever Prototypes, LLC. “Parallel Plot Structure in Literature: Nonlinear
Plots.”Storyboard That, www.storyboardthat.com/articles/e/nonlinear-plots.
Hamm, James A., “Addicts Speak: An Exploratory Ethnographic Study of Opioid Addiction”
(2018). Honors Theses. 465. https://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/honors_theses/465
“Real Stories.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, 17 Aug. 2020, www.cdc.gov/rxawareness/stories/index.html.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Office of the Surgeon General, Facing
Addiction in America: The Surgeon General’s Spotlight on Opioids. Washington, DC: HHS, September 2018.
Webster, Fiona, et al. “An Ethnography of Chronic Pain Management in Primary Care: The
Social Organization of Physicians’ Work in the Midst of the Opioid Crisis.” PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, 1 May 2019, journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0215148.
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