In other idiocy

[davidgillon]

I may have kicked my Kindle Fire into the bath. I thought I'd gotten away with it, but nope, it shut down later. Or at least the screen did, the rest of it, such as the alarm, still worked until the battery ran down. Try turning your alarm off when you can't see the icon to swipe....

At least I timed it right for Black Friday.

Had an appointment with my doctor this evening for a medication review, which is code for "we want to take your opioids away" (I'm only on one drug). Convinced Dr Singh(1) to wait six months back in the spring, didn't hold out much hope of keeping them this time, but this time the appointment was with Dr Singh(2) (I'm not certain if they're sisters or not) and we talked about my experience of pain, and what had worked and what hadn't, and at the end she said "I normally don't like keeping patients on opioids, but actually, you're the ideal candidate*."

Hurrah for doctors applying logic, not opiod hysteria!

* Low dosage, I haven't built up a tolerance, it works, most other things don't, and I did a test a couple of weeks ago to confirm my pain levels are still where they were when this was first prescribed by going cold turkey for four days (I intended going a full week but it hurt too much).

Comments

[davidgillon]

I'm on one of the buprenorphine variants (butec at the moment, was butrans until this year, via weekly patches). I strongly suspect there's cost pressure not to prescribe it to patients.

When I re-did my pain management course in 2015, having previously done it about 2002, they'd changed their line on opioids from "people with chronic pain don't get addicted" to "if you have chronic pain there's only a small risk of addiction", which was obviously changed because of US research, but completely non-hysterical.