Prescription Painkillers
Prescription Painkillers
The article by the Los Angeles Times, Legal Drugs, Deadly Outcomes, reports on how prescription painkillers have evolved. For many years prescription painkillers were limited to cancer patients and others with terminal illnesses. The idea was that the risk of addiction outweighed the benefit of the painkiller to patients whose illness was not life-threatening. As society has evolved and physicians continued to argue that it’s inhuman not to prescribe painkillers to patients to ease moderate pain. In 2001, congress enacted the Decade of Pain Control and Research. Between 1999 and 2010, the use of prescribed painkillers quadrupled. As a result of the explosion in painkiller use, there have been 3,733 deaths from prescription drugs in Los Angeles, Orange, and Ventura and San Diego counties from 2006 to 2011. The majority of the deaths were related to overdose and the use of the painkillers in lieu of additional drugs or alcohol. This article relates to many different concepts throughout the chapters we have covered. Beliefs, values, and health, discussed in chapter 2, are the material that has the most relation to the article. On page 51, the book discusses the determinants of health. The health determinants are the major factors that, over time, affect the health and wellbeing of individuals. The determinants where later on broken down into four major inputs that contribute to health and well-being. The four major inputs are environment, lifestyle, heredity, and medical care. These four inputs encompass the entire article. The environment factor of having more access to health care and hereditary factors such as genetics could be part of the resulting problems of these deaths discussed in the article. Many of the cases in the article were about availability and ease of acquiring the painkillers. Becoming addicted to the painkillers is extremely high and some people are genetically more susceptible to becoming addicted
The article by the Los Angeles Times, Legal Drugs, Deadly Outcomes, reports on how prescription painkillers have evolved. For many years prescription painkillers were limited to cancer patients and others with terminal illnesses. The idea was that the risk of addiction outweighed the benefit of the painkiller to patients whose illness was not life-threatening. As society has evolved and physicians continued to argue that it’s inhuman not to prescribe painkillers to patients to ease moderate pain. In 2001, congress enacted the Decade of Pain Control and Research. Between 1999 and 2010, the use of prescribed painkillers quadrupled. As a result of the explosion in painkiller use, there have been 3,733 deaths from prescription drugs in Los Angeles, Orange, and Ventura and San Diego counties from 2006 to 2011. The majority of the deaths were related to overdose and the use of the painkillers in lieu of additional drugs or alcohol. This article relates to many different concepts throughout the chapters we have covered. Beliefs, values, and health, discussed in chapter 2, are the material that has the most relation to the article. On page 51, the book discusses the determinants of health. The health determinants are the major factors that, over time, affect the health and wellbeing of individuals. The determinants where later on broken down into four major inputs that contribute to health and well-being. The four major inputs are environment, lifestyle, heredity, and medical care. These four inputs encompass the entire article. The environment factor of having more access to health care and hereditary factors such as genetics could be part of the resulting problems of these deaths discussed in the article. Many of the cases in the article were about availability and ease of acquiring the painkillers. Becoming addicted to the painkillers is extremely high and some people are genetically more susceptible to becoming addicted