Opioids Persuasive Speech

Human beings generally always want to avoid pain. Whether it be emotional or physical, we try to find ways to relieve and/or replace discomfort with some comfort. Physicians and other healthcare professionals are faced with patients daily who want most if not all of their pain taken away. To address this concern, doctors can prescribe painkillers to help alleviate some of the pain. However, those painkillers, specifically opioids, are becoming a problem as they are being abused and people are becoming addicted to them. In fact, by 2010, the United States, with about 5 percent of the world’s population, was consuming ninety-nine per cent of the world’s hydrocodone, along with eighty per cent of the oxycodone, and sixty-five per cent of the hydromorphone

Since life after surgery is stressful and painful, all the patients had some sort of pain medication, with a majority on opioids. Although they were on all sorts of medications, many complained of intense pain and expressed their frustration as they were a 10 on the pain scale and demanded they be given more, all while smiling. Granted, some of those patients really needed the opioids to control their pain, but in my opinion, most were claiming to be so high on the pain scale as they believed that by doing so, it brought out stronger medications more and more often, even if it wouldn’t be safe. An article in Scope, published by Stanford Medicine, acknowledges this phenomenon, “Today’s cultural ethos of ‘all suffering should be avoided’ encourages patients to believe that any level of subjective pain is unacceptable, and that doctors have a responsibility to remove the pain, lest the patient, in addition to being in pain, is psychologically traumatized by having to experience pain” (Scope Blog). However, in an attempt to change this cultural view, Utah Department of Health has begun to campaign and educate the citizens of Utah about the opioid abuse epidemic in the state with the slogan, “Stop the

Since hospitals and physicians can be rated, there is constant stress put upon keeping the patient happy and satisfied. Hospitals also receive some incentives from The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services based on these surveys (Stat News). Because of this, it is not surprising that hospitals tell their physicians to prescribe opioids and other drugs to satisfy the unrealistic expectation that the patients should feel no pain, even if it is unsafe as it can lead to abuse. Here is where many blame physicians for the epidemic of painkiller abuse. Many argue that physicians should do what is best for the patients and not prescribe such dangerous drugs. However, this becomes unrealistic when one factors in the pressure of remaining in high status and respected in the public eye, and the convenience of prescribing opioids. This is so because, writing prescriptions for opioids immediately satisfies the patient’s needs for strong medication and is readily reimbursed by third-party payers, whereas going through alternate routes of reducing pain is time consuming and costly (New England Journal of