many. long island here.
really sort of sickening even the state of fucking dying in this country
Interesting story: I was adopted at three days old. My birth-mother found me through a search service when I was 20, and from there, I met her, and later my birth-father. He was a physician, doing Emergency Medicine, at that time. He later became a Pain-Management doc, practicing in my city. We saw each other frequently and he'd prescribe me Valium, which greatly helped my anxiety and allowed me to work in my very stressful job (I was a copy editor for an alt-weekly).
Fast forward about 10 years: He had to give up the pain-management practice because he'd been called before the Texas Medical Board too many times for inadequate charting and over-prescribing. He switched to Internal Medicine, but still did pain-management. He was known for spending a lot of time with his patients and was not shy about prescribing meds. This came back to haunt him about three years ago.
A family member of one of his patients, pissed that Greg was prescribing her OxyContin, tipped off the DEA, who raided his home and office and found a boatload of drugs. Greg was an addict, himself, by this time. He was facing heavy, heavy time. He was stripped of his license, the Feds seized about 3 million bucks from him, and he was still facing around 20 years. He hanged himself in his backyard shed in October 2020. I didn't hear about it for a year.
I know he did wrong. But I also know that he was good to his patients and helped so many of them with chronic pain and anxiety. Fear of legal ramifications has caused most doctors, especially in my area, to just not prescribe anything that could benefit their patients. Shit, my husband died of cancer last April, and the last time he was in the hospital, two days before he died, they wouldn't even give him anything but hydrocodone for the pain. They didn't want him to get addicted! He had terminal cancer, assholes! It wasn't until the hospice nurse came to our house after he was discharged that he got liquid Morphine and Methadone. And I was basically told, "Give him as much Morphine as he wants. If you run out, we will have some delivered to you right away."