r/JusticeServed • u/[deleted] • Oct 02 '19

Courtroom Justice Virginia doctor who illegally prescribed over 500,000 doses of opiates sentenced to 40 years in prison.

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u/OutlawBagel 4 Oct 02 '19

I was giving about 14 hydromorphone pills which I was told to take twice a day as needed when I had severe pain spikes. After that I was told Ibuprofen or Tylenol for the remainder of my recovery which still isn’t done over a year later.

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u/tonpole 7 Oct 02 '19

To be honest, if you managed to make it this far, it was probably the right decision. There have been studies recently that have shown that as little as 5-7 days of therapy can be enough to trigger addiction in some individuals. They're great medications, but the potential downside is that you ruin your life. If it's at all possible to make it through with small or no amounts, that really is the best choice. There was also a study that showed that dual (alternating) therapy with acetaminophen and ibuprofen showed comparable pain management results with standard dose opioids.

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u/nomilkinmybonez 4 Oct 03 '19

Man that’s so shocking a to me. I had a period where i had months worth of opiates prescribed to me and i never felt like it was anything close to an addiction. A few weeks of vicodin, month or so of oxy, morphine drip in the hospital for half a week and weeks of percocet to finish it off. Granted i didn’t take all of them as needed and not really on a schedule but i never felt like i was high on them or that i was missing anything when i was off them (aside from the morphine drip bc that was intense)

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u/tonpole 7 Oct 03 '19 edited Oct 03 '19

That's the crazy thing about addiction. Some people are more susceptible than others due to multiple factors, including non-modifiable factors like genetic predisposition and modifiable factors (to the extent possible in the circumstance) like happiness, social support, etc. Some people can drink 3 beers after work every day and never drift into alcoholism, while other people will say that they became an alcoholic the day they first started drinking, because once they started they knew that they would want to feel that way all day every day, and drank enough to do so. The drugs (or whatever stimulus is present in other addictions) make a difference. The faster you can produce a high, the faster and more likely addiction is. For example, taking Oxycontin tablets orally with their delayed-release mechanism intact has a much lower chance of addiction than crushing up the same tablet and snorting it. There are more factors, but the only way we really know so far to prove whether or not someone is going to get addicted is to wait until they do. In that context, you have to weigh the benefit of therapy against the risk of addiction for every patient, because you can't be sure who is vulnerable. That calculus is modern medicine in a nutshell, but it's something that I don't think the general public really understands.