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Adding to that, the authors of the article and the paper are constructing an argument that over-prescription of opiod painkillers is a significant component of
by _sword 11y ago
Adding to that, the authors of the article and the paper are constructing an argument that over-prescription of opiod painkillers is a significant component of the problem.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoHow about: they got more affluent, ate too much red meat and died of strokes?
- sithadmin 11y agoWhat are you trying to get at here? If this is supposed to be sarcasm, I'm missing it.
- lujim 11y agoYeah could be that, but think stress. We started the millennium with a stock market crash, 9/11, the Concord crashed, the Space Shuttle broke up on reentry, two wars kicked off and just when things started calming down... the Great Recession. If you weren't laid off then you probably knew a few people that were. It seemed like everything we had built over the past two decades was failing us all at once. The 90's seemed like a time when you just watched Seinfeld on Thursday nights and watched your stocks go up in value. The 2000's and on have been a bit more stressful.
- maxerickson 11y agoThe morbidity statistics they are using would break out strokes as a category. The abstract for the paper says This increase for whites was largely accounted for by increasing death rates from drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis. ( http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/10/29/1518393112.abstract http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/10/29/1518393112.abst... ) So strokes probably don't explain it. In a previous discussion I speculated that military service (and thus combat) could be a contributing factor. It would be interesting to see how many of the suicides and overdoses were people who had experienced combat.
- programmernews3 11y agoComplete straw man argument but not surprising from a self-hating liberal. The article details the increasing causes of mortality in this group.
- lujim 11y agoNo doubt there. Over prescribing them leads to dependency, then the DEA terrifies doctors into abruptly cutting the doses for those already on them and those patients turn to more sinister alternatives like heroin.
- GoodOldNe 11y agoER doc here. I think that this is absolutely a large contributor of these mortality trends. There are so many more factors than just users turning to IV drugs / overdosing on rx meds though, and I think that's what we're just now finding out -- things like anhedonia that occurs because of neural-level changes in brain wiring due to long-term use of opioids, hyperalgesia (increased sensing of pain) from the same thing, and more and more people developing an illness script around chronic pain that they see themselves as victims of, necesitating ever-escalating doses of analgesia (whether that's in the form of opiates, opioids, alcohol, other substances) to deal with. Really, really big problem that I think we're just waking up to deal with.
- pnathan 11y ago> ...more and more people developing an illness script around chronic pain that they see themselves as victims of... Can you talk about this more? Some family members have routine complaints of chronic pain without a concrete physiological root cause, and I'd like to understand your comment further.