NEW BOOK: In Pain –
July 8, 2019 –
Interview highlights
On what happened when he tried tapering opioids after an ill-advised consultation with a plastic surgeon, who recommended abruptly reducing his dosage
He didn’t know what he was talking about; that wasn’t his area of expertise. He just tried to think of something that was reasonable — and he would eventually admit this, so this isn’t too much editorializing — but we went home and the next day we dropped the first dose and it immediately sent me into withdrawal. … It got worse over the first few days, and so we start to get really freaked out, because I feel like I’ve got the worst flu I’ve ever had multiplied by some order of magnitude. And I’m thinking, I have an entire month of this to get through. And so [my partner and I] get pretty freaked out.
On why it was so hard to find a doctor to help him taper opioids
I asked myself that question every day, every hour for a very long time. And once I transitioned from being an opioid patient to being an opioid researcher the answer I came to was something like “a lot of doctors don’t know, so this is just a knowledge gap.” So this is probably the best description of my plastic surgeon. He just had no idea how to do this. And that’s understandable, because clinicians — doctors — don’t get a lot of pain education in medical school. It’s not required — a bunch of them get zero — and, on average, you only get a handful of hours. So there’s a knowledge gap for sure.
