Big change to make it harder for patients to get pain killers like Vicodin

[Ms. Toad]

46. I get by by living on a heating pad -sometimes 24/6

and by decades of figuring out what triggers the worst of the pain and avoiding it.

Fortunately, my pain level ranges from 1 to 5 - and when it gets to 5, I can live with it for a short (a month) period of time until the 24/7 heating pad takes it back down to its normal background level of 1-2.

But my chronic back pain isn't the kind that is treated well by narcotics - and the only medication which addresses it at all creates both physical and emotional depression. So I avoid it unless I am completely non-functional.

But, as far as chronic pain sufferers, I am lucky. I have a non-pharmaceutical treatment that keeps it to a dull roar. Many don't - and this change will make their lives immeasurably harder and they may, as the wife of one of my professors did, just decide the drain of keeping the pain to a manageable level (which will be significantly harder now) is too much and end their lives.