Addiction

I've been very open about my gout, and wrote a couple of years ago about the pain being so terrible and all-consuming that I flirted with thoughts of suicide. And now Matt Yglesias is writing about chronic pain vs. addiction:

But short of dying, experiencing chronic pain is one of the worst things that can happen to someone. The correct ordering of priorities is to try to make sure that nobody suffering from treatable chronic pain goes untreated, and then try to minimize addiction risks within that framework. The view that people suffering pain should get relief subject to the binding constraint that we need to fight addiction has a nice Puritan logic to it, but it doesn’t make any real sense.

There is a madness to the idea that preventing people from becoming addicts is somehow more important than relieving people of obscene pain. For one, we're only alive for a very short time, so I really don't see why pretending to be martyrs because we're as miserable as possible, and feeling that anyone will give a shit about our martyrdom in an afterlife, is somehow preferable to living a normal life that is somewhat pain-free. For another, I don't think people understand that there is a threshold of pain that becomes all-consuming; ie you're not just dealing with "oh, my knee hurts," you're also dealing with not being able to sleep, not being able to think about anything else, and not being able to live a normal life.  Such pain is overwhelming, and swallows a fucking life.

But also, anyone dealing with excruciating pain is someone who isn't contributing to society in any real way. I spent the first two weeks of this month dealing with such pain that I dreaded walking to the goddam bathroom, or kitchen. And while it's fun to imagine what a fat, pathetic loser I am, that's also two weeks I'm not walking around buying shit in stores, or coming up with iPhone Apps for people to buy. And if I exist, I'm sure there's a lot of people like this.

Meanwhile, a few years ago when I went to a clinic, the doctor diagnosed my gout and then told me I should take an Advil. I looked at her like she was crazy. I said for the price of Advil, I could buy a hammer, which I would pay her to bury in my fucking skull.  She sheepishly told me well, we don't like to prescribe anything more serious to patients, since they might become, say it with me, addicted.

Incredible.