Proper treatment is a hard pill to swallow
EARLIER this year I came down with what the medical profession calls patellar tendinitis. Or a sore knee to me and you.
I’d like to say it was the marathon training which caused it or the fell walking or even those high kicking exploits while out on the town one Saturday night, but I’d be a liar.
It just happened – one day I had two working knees and the next I didn’t.
Now I’m not a wuss. I’ve had kids and I’ve sat through several episodes of Flog It! so I understand what pain is but, blimey, this hurt like hell.
I hobbled round like an old woman, my knee swollen and unsightly, popping painkillers at regular intervals and assuming the problem would go away as mysteriously as it came.
But it didn’t. So I popped more pain killers. And then different painkillers.
This went on for a week and then two and then more. Worried about not just my knee but the amount of drugs I was consuming I made an appointment with my GP.
He declared I had a sore knee – that’s seven years of medical training for you – and advised me to carry on taking the tablets, dismissing my worries that I was single-handedly keeping GlaxoSmithKline in business.
After a further 10 days or so, things improved but popping those painkillers had, I recognised, become a bit of a habit. I’d find myself taking them
almost automatically in a bid to keep one step ahead of the pain and I was relieved when my knee returned to a less alarming size and I no longer had to knock back pain killers like sweets.
So the news this week that health chiefs fear hundreds of thousands of people are hooked on prescription drugs comes as no surprise to me.
A recent report commissioned on behalf of the Government found that half of people using strong painkillers, sleeping tablets and anti-depressants – and that’s a lot of people across the UK – had been on them for at least 12 months and that that kind of long term use on such a scale was a sign of dependancy.
Now, I fear I know what’s going to happen here. The finger of blame will be pointed squarely at us poor patients who only want a bit of respite from our chronic insomnia, depressive illness or achy joints, the argument being we should all take more responsibility for our own health.
They are our bodies and we should be in charge of them. And I guess that’s true – to an extent.
But if you’re desperate and in pain then it’s easy to understand why the quick-fix answer seems to lie in a bottle of pills. And if no alternative is offered, then why not carry on taking the tablets?
I feel sorry for GPs, too, who are under massive time and budget pressure. Prescribing drugs might be seen as the ‘easy’ way out, but if you have people in tears in your surgery, I can imagine it’s difficult to do anything else.
The real answer for many lies in looking beyond chemicals and towards treatments such as talking therapies or social activities to reduce depression and activity programmes and physio to tackle pain.
Of course these things take money and we all know there isn’t exactly a surfeit of that swilling round the NHS at the moment.
Yet long term use of drugs may even bring with it its own costly side-effects – not to mention the price of the drugs themselves – so alternative treatments may actually save the NHS cash in the long term.
We need to think of our health in financial terms – and realise it’s our most valuable asset.