Affect on the Individual:
You
fall and break your leg, after surgery and a few days in the hospital
its time to go home. The doctor sends you with instructions on how to
care for your healing leg. Along with the instruction
comes a prescription to pain medication. You take the entire
prescription but after a few weeks, the dose just doesn’t seem to be
enough. “What’s the problem with taking four pills at a time instead of
two?” “Two pills just doesn’t get rid of the pain anymore.”
The addiction begins.
Over
a period of time, pain medications may loose their effectiveness on an
individual’s pain level. They being to think they can’t coup without
there meds and it consumes their daily routine.
Are they afraid of the pain that will occur if they don’t take the
medication? Are they truly suffering or is it just a figment of the
imagination? Is their body in a habit of receiving this drug and can’t
function properly without it? What sets off an individual
to become addicted to prescription pain medications?
Affect on family
When a family member is addicted to a prescribed pain medication, how would the family members be affected? How would there
lives change? Depending on which family member is addicted, would
the amount of affection change? If a parent is addicted to a pain
medication, would there children become more likely to become addicted?
In a family, could having a family member who
is addicted to pain medication make the family more likely to become
destroyed, or is the affection not that drastic? Would the family
distance themselves from the addicted family member before they would
let there family fall apart? If a parent is addicted
to pain medication, are there children more likely to rebel and
distance themselves from that parent more than in a “normal” family
situation?
