bandit king of lunch and string

Codeine is (roughly) strictly more dangerous than a half-size dose of morphine, then?? Why does anyone use codeine

(accidentally posted before I was done)

 

He didn't get into much detail because it was a general lecture on pain management, but yeah, that's the gist of it. People still use it because, from my understanding, since it is a roundabout process of making morphine it doesn't hit like it would, so it is less prone to abuse -and just a small portion of the population is at risk as an over-metabolizer. But his opinion is that if the person is in such bad pain that opioids are the only thing left to try to manage it, it is better to use a smaller dose of straight morphine than to risk it with codeine.

Eta: I cant give much more detail about this because I haven't taken pharmacology yet ):

 

yeah, that's what happened with my grandma. like most of my family, she doesn't tolerate the side effects of opioids very well, but one of the ones it gave her was memory issues and drowsiness + sleep disturbances - combined with the fact that whoever her discharge nurse was didn't go over her medication regimen with her very well, she was discharged with instructions that she thought was "stay ahead of your pain, so take x pill(s) when you wake up [spacing information she just didn't get] and keep taking pills even if you aren't in pain" (the last emphasis was necessary, people in my family historically resist taking pain meds/stop pain meds once the pain is "tolerable" and then are exceedingly miserable when the pain kicks in; we were all a bit annoyed at the instruction because combined with everything else it was a recipe for disaster, but i do understand why that was emphasized so heavily for her)

which meant that she went home, had her sleep schedule and awareness of time fucked to hell and back by what she was on, ended up taking her medication twice as fast as she was supposed to (iirc there was a [wait 6-8 hours between doses - it's good to time doses around when you go to sleep and wake up] that got mistranslated above), kept taking it because even tho she was loopy she wasn't in pain and she was supposed to be taking it if she wasn't in pain, right???

on the one hand i do hate opioid restrictions because of how they fuck over people with long term pain management via opioids, but the fact that she was only allowed to have a week's supply at a time, and then ran out on day three, definitely helped make everyone aware of what was happening - tapering off took her like three months tho, and she was miserable as all get out

she's since had "no opioids/opiates" put on her medical file because the withdrawal and tapering it off she's said was one of the worst things she's ever experienced

also going to add: at least when grandma was going through this, "addiction" and "dependence" are treated as two different but related things, medically. iirc addiction is specifically only defined behaviorally - are you using a drug to your detriment, seeking out this drug when you know it's bad for you, and circumventing barriers placed between you and the drug(s)* - while dependence is just "bodies do that sometimes." technically, my grandmother was never labeled an addict because of this - she was dependent, she got medically supervised attention to taper off, she shows no signs of seeking the drug out recreationally. the difference is because, in a perfect world, a patient like my grandmother needed no additional addiction-focused behavioral treatment (read: therapy) whereas a patient exhibiting addiction behavior would need a behavioral intervention combined with medical supervision

*yes, this does mean it is very easy to label people addicts when the show up to a doctor's office asking for pain management; the extreme end of this definition can be applied to "anyone asking for x drug" (and has) even tho supposedly people showing up asking for pain management are excluded

 

ugh i get the same problem when i cant use my cpap machine. a very good way to get the swelling to go down is to drink a hot sugary drink and follow it immediately with a cold glass of water! its more effort than just sucking on a cough drop, but its very tasty and makes me feel much better

peppermint tea or hot cocoa with a peppermint dissolved in is my favorite, but hot cider also is very nice and hot koolaid or fruit punch is wonderful.

 

Nurse fluff!

 

i heart my babby dose of baclofen with my whole heart, such a useful lil pill. (I have control over one strip of muscle in my inner thigh. and boy howdy does it like to spasm me out of using it ever at night, but it is best stim to sway the leggy just a tiny bit and remind it that i am the law of the land)

 

I don't think anyone's saying they can't tell the difference? It's more, "Wow, that was not a word I needed to unexpectedly see while scrolling through werewolf porn and it gave me a visceral 'yuck, racists' reaction, would you mind adding 2 slashes in the middle in future so my werewolf porn experience doesn't have to be tainted with the reminder that racists exist."