When I did the numbers on this the other day, using the National Pain Reportâs numbers on chronic pain patients, and cross-checking them with the ADAâs numbers on other illnesses, what I came up with was this:
10K deaths from opioid pills specifically.
100 million Americans with chronic pain.
.0001 percent of Americans with chronic pain will die from opioid overdose.Â
Thatâs what is called âstatistically insignificant.â
For perspective, a woman is twice as likely to die in childbirth in the developed world as a chronic pain patient is to die of an opioid overdose. Why arenât we talking about the âepidemicâ of women dying in childbirth? Youâre as likely to be killed by lightning which first hit someone else. WILL NO ONE THINK OF THE LIGHTNING EPIDEMIC?
For contrast, using the ADAâs numbers for diabetics n the US, .004 percent of diabetics die directly from complications of diabetes every year. While thatâs still a tiny number compared to the population, not only is it orders of magnitude larger in percentages, but 65K people died from complications of diabetes.
Six and a half times as many! Six and a half!Â
And thatâs not even talking about things like heart conditions and the like.
So I say this as a person who is currently and without shame on an opioid pain management plan (along with other solutions including massage, steroid shots, and other things that frankly arenât anybody elseâs business but whatever), and who has watched a very close friend lose her mother to diabetes complications this year⊠why are we okay with stigmatizing one medication (pain relief) over another type (insulin/diabetes).
Well, I mean, there really isnât any money in âaddiction counselingâ for insulin. There are just deaths.
I wish people saw pain the same way, because pain will kill you too.
blakekathryn
ellievsbear
amandla
andulkaphoto
stormborns
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