Can the short term benefits of my ability to assuage pain create long term problems of addiction?

Fr. Joseph martin, a well know lecturer in the field of addiction and founder of “Fr. Martin’s Ashley,” an inpatient SUD treatment center in MD, used to argue that, “Pain is God’s greatest gift to mankind.” It is the pain associated with a situation that eventually motivates one to take the necessary steps to affect change. Like the sleeper awakened in the night by the chill autumn air, but is not quite uncomfortable enough yet to get up from a warm bed to close the window, does prescribing enough medication--both the dosage and the number of doses prescribed—to assuage all pain actually delay making proactive changes in one's lifestyle and foster dependence? Does not “managing pain” mean reducing it to a tolerable level rather than assuaging it completely? And because my patient/client “demands” that I do what needs doing to make the pain “go away,” does this necessitate that I prescribe “more” rather than refer to other practitioners who utilize behavioral medicine for analgesic purposes?

If, as Jim Croce crooned back in the 70s, "nobody ever had a rainbow until they had the rain," does "a little bit of pain" remind us that change is needed; change in my behavior as I live my life, not change in yours as a potential writer of prescriptions?

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To ReducePrescription Drug Abuse, Focus Less on Patient Satisfaction

Pain management education must help prescribers focus less on patient satisfaction, and more on their functional improvement, according to Sherry Green, the CEO of the National Alliance for Model State Drug Laws.

What do you think?

Dr. Robert