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A comment on the pain angle. A lot of the pain that opioid medication is prescribed for is chronic pain. And if you look at the relevant statistics (http://www.painmed.org/patientcenter/facts_on_pain.aspx ), it's actually that the US does not only have an opioid epidemic. It has a chronic pain epidemic, it's just that it's trying to medicate it via opioids. The thing is, talking to doctors who specialise in pain research, for most people, chronic pain is like depression or emotional eating/obesity - it's like the physical bodily expression of chronic stress. Everyday grind. Women are twice as likely to report headaches and orofacial pain than men, for example. And it's not just that women and minorities find doctors to be less sympathetic to their pain - it's just that lower status and greater stress cause give one a greater probability of acquiring chronic pain in the first place. And, conversely, because it's a stress thing, chronic pain can be cured, or hugely mitigated, by physical therapy, massages, gentle exercise, better eating, better support nets, better workplace security, increased status and respect and so on. Just quality of life stuff. At some level, I'm pretty sure a case could be made that this pain-opioid epidemic is partly the result of [sanders]widening inequality[/sanders], although, like I noted, it's not just the inequality of income, it's also inequality of status. It's just that, similar to the obesity epidemic, the actual cure to the underlying pain epidemic is, well, transformation of the understanding of the connection between lifestyle, work conditions and pain. And, obviously, [sanders]the glorious workers' revolution[/sanders].
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Jan 21, 2016 14:34
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Guavanaut posted:If you're doing a Marxist analysis of it, you could also blame the increased secularization of society. I'm a chronic myofascial pain sufferer myself, so I had to acquire some understanding of how to deal with it, and what to avoid, because I needed to learn how to doctors so that they wouldn't be just 'here's a pill'. Part of it was attending this MOOC by James Fricton - https://www.coursera.org/course/chronicpain . The analysis comes all from there, and I'm pretty sure you can find more academic stuff if you start at the link I gave. Quarrel with the good doctors, not with me. For me, even though I'm post-surgical and the underlying cause won't ever go away, lifestyle changes worked. But, hey, anecdotes.
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Jan 21, 2016 14:53
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GreyjoyBastard posted:At the very least, the policy responses are... dissimilar. What're Hillary's and Bernie's plans for dealing with the issue?
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Jan 26, 2016 07:36
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