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Originally Posted by DBel  My 41 year old sister died one year ago today at 2 p.m. CST from a SOMA overdose. She had been addicted to SOMA's for 3+ years. She was prescribed 90 pills on Monday 11/15/04 and she died exactly 48 hours later. The doctor who prescribed these pills is a Louisiana doctor whom I believe knew he was prescribing SOMA's to an addict who did not have a medicinal need for this drug. I am appalled at the ease of obtaining this pharmaceutical legally and from information received, illegally ("street" sources) also. My sister had been clean for 3 months from this drug and through rehab more than once. The only option we had left was to seek involuntary commitment for mental health reasons. Regretfully, I did not move through the judiciary system to try the last hope of saving her life soon enough. She died in vain unless someone else reads this and thinks twice about using any drug, prescription for an illegal purpose or otherwise "street drugs". She left two children, one of whom was 10 years old and the pain that she ended for herself has only begun for the rest of the family she left behind. |
PLEASE READ THIS REPLY
Doctors who prescribe narcotics for people complaining of pain control DO NOT MAKE JUNKIES... people do it to themselves.
There has been PLENTY enough information about the dangers of addictive substances out there so that NO ONE can claim ignorance when it comes right down to it. "My sister got hooked because she didn't know
OxyContin was so addictive and certainly didn't know that she couldn't chew it up or snort it for a mega high" just won't fly anymore these days. Your sister, I'm sorry to say, knew exactly what she was doing over the years as she increased her Soma use. Ninety Soma in a month is a VERY conservative amount, in my opinion, yet when she downed the whole bottle, you blame him for her decision! Classic. If the patient takes the medication exactly as prescribed, there is very little risk of addiction or overdose even for harder narcotics. When it comes to Soma and
Tramadol (Ultram), the risks for addiction and overdose is even lower than for narcotics (in 12 years, I've seen none of my patients hooked on either drug, and only two who felt psychologically dependent on
Ultram... but rehab for them was NOTHING like the horrors of what people go through with heroin or other hard core narcotics addictions.
No, your SISTER chose to abuse and then OD on Soma. That is not the doctor's or Soma's fault. We live in a society that puts the blame anywhere but where it belongs. Your sister could have gotten Soma sent to her via a black pharm site with little more than a forged prescription, or less. The only reason she targeted the doctor is because of his/her sympathy for you sister's claimed chronic pain, muscle spasms, or whatever. It was cheaper for her to hit him up for the Soma and charge it to her insurance (if she had insurance) than to get it through a black pharmacy or the street, but I am absolutely sure that she'd have gotten her fix and her suicide one way or another with or without this doctor's prescription for Soma.
It is sort of like blaming McDonalds for one's obesity, a hand gun for committing murder, or cigarettes causing your lung cancer (after it was firmly known that cigarettes extremely increase the risk for lung cancer). Take responsibility people and when you get help, like rehab, stick to the program. Sure, temptation is more easily succumbed to if the item is easy to get, but YOU make the decision to walk into your doctor's office with your sob story and ask for the darn pain killers. It is YOU who decide to take more than prescribed to get your buzz.
Doctors like me get hammered from both sides. We're told by physician pain specialists and pain research experts that we are doing a miserable job at adequately treating/controlling our patient's pain. On the other hand, we have people like you who feel that we're about the level of street drug dealers. We're also told by the feds that we give too much controlled drugs as a group. To even prescribe narcotics we have to pay extra money to get the license to do so and we are monitored very closely by the DEA on our patterns of narcotics prescriptions. Do you know how many of my patients in a single day see me because of pain problems? At least 70-80%! Pain is very often what will bring the most ardent anti-medicine, anti-doctor person into the office. These patients are people, for the most part, who've already tried multiple over the counter pain killers like
Tylenol,
Advil,
Aleve, etc. Now, their pain is past the point of anything but stronger drugs. Soma, Darvocet, and Ultram are the next step, and one step short of true narcotics. Your sister's MD was not being careless with her, he was being WISE to not give her harder drugs like
Lortab,
morphine, or
oxycodone. I doubt I'll change your mind, but I hope to give you a glimpse of what is going on in your doctor's head when you come in for pain relief.
However, in your case, you might could still blame your sister's doctor for her death. After all, maybe, like in my case, her pain was so severe that Soma wasn't controlling it. Chronic uncontrolled pain is a COMMON cause of suicide. Maybe she felt ashamed having to ask the doctor for Soma so often or that she was trapped having to take pain meds her whole life. Maybe she felt shamed by family and friends who thought of her as a junkie and let her know it, when she really did have uncontrolled pain. Maybe she felt like a complete failure, having gone through rehab and broken her vows to herself and others by getting Soma to relieve her pain. I get ticked when people point fingers and tell another person that they "don't need pain medication." How the hell would you know that? Maybe, just maybe, her suicide had absolutely nothing to do with the doctor or Soma at all! Unless she left a note blaming her suicide on the addiction to Soma and that hideous doctor who was her supplier (against her will), we'll never know. Surely, you don't believe she took 90 Soma just to get a little bit better high! Her suicide wasn't some kind of accident, it was deliberate.
Doctors at least TRY very hard to find objective data to support the patient's claim of chronic pain before we treat them with pain killers. The system isn't fool proof, however (see story below). Unfortunately, family and friends don't usually give their loved one even the courtesy of looking objectively at the situation. They label them "addicts" and often try to convince them that their pain doesn't really exist or that they shouldn't be taking a narcotic (sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly). They often tell the patient that they should be relying on God for all their pain control. Who do they think gave us the ability to create drugs to help people in pain????
Hence, maybe your sister committed suicide to escape her chronic pain situation (which by the way, she could easily have done with a bottle of Tylenol or a gun... so why attack the Soma or the Physician). Maybe, just maybe her suicide had absolutely nothing to do with the doctor or Soma at all! Unless she left a note blaming her suicide on the addiction to Soma that she couldn't control and that hideous doctor who was forcing her to take it, serving as her supplier, we'll never know. Surely, you don't believe she took 90 Soma just to get a little better high! Her suicide wasn't some kind of accident, it was deliberate. God only knows her real reasons for taking her own life and for you to presume it is all the doctor's fault just isn't fair.
However, the good news is that you can still sooth your anger and the painful loss of your sister by blaming the Doc anyway. He could have caused your sister's death by not giving her enough pain relief, telling her this was her last prescription for Soma, asking her to leave his practice because he didn't feel like he should prescribe it anymore, etc. He's damned if he does and damned if he doesn't treat her pain. I know, because I fight the same battles EVERY freaking day.
I don't believe you'll ever read this, but if you do, please understand that I'm not trying to put you down. I realize that when you suffer such a horrible loss, you want to find someone to blame. You can't blame the one who's dead and get any satisfaction, so what do you do? You target the doctor, friends, etc. who might have ever given her a narcotic in history. Truth is, I feel a lot of sympathy over your loss of your sister. Is the doctor blameless? I don't know. Sure, he could have made a mistake, but chances are that he was really and truly trying to do what he became a doctor for... to relieve human suffering (and to feed his family at the same time, of course). Why not give him the benefit of the doubt or at least go and talk to him about your anger face to face and hear his side of the story. It is cowardly for you to put him down without at least doing that. I've been the victim of the patient or family anger plenty of times, and it isn't pleasant, trust me. Usually, when I hear a patient or family is mad at me, I try my best to schedule them an appointment, free of charge to come and air their anger so that I can tell them what was going on at the time whatever problem occurred. You might find that the doctor was doing all he could to help you sister's pain, SHORT of writing her true narcotics... especially if he knew about her addictions in the past.
Should we doctors refuse to give any of the stronger pain killers to relieve pain in people who are addicts or just let them suffer (not those after it purely for a high, but with real pain, but a history of misuse of narcotics in the past)? That's a question bigger than I have time to cover. CH
oops 
Sorry for several mistakes in the post above, as I was writing very fast and I had to cut and paste a lot when I went over the word limit. Therefore, there are some references to actual cases I had to cut out and an accidental double paste of one passage, but you'll get the jist of what I'm talking about. CH 
We all know that. I did it too at one time. I was good at it and don't hold my prescribing drs responsible for my decisions. 
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