A new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sheds light on just how fragile the relationship between patients and opioid addiction is. The past decade has seen a tremendous rise in not just opioids (20,101 deaths in 2015), but in heroin overdoses (12,990 in 2015), an addiction which is often spurred by the inability to afford or procure prescription drugs.
The new study confirms what many know to be true; it’s the quick ramp-up to addiction that makes these widely prescribed drugs so popular. A short-term (five-day) prescription for opioids increases any patient’s risk of dependency and long-term addiction.
Here’s the graph in question, with the lines representing the likelihood of addiction both one year from initial prescription and three years from initial prescription.
The study found that 6 percent of users given a one-day supply of opioids were using them—prescribed or otherwise—a year later. That’s a somewhat jarring statistic in its own right, knowing that a single prescription equates to a 1 in 16 chance your dependence on that drug will run for the next year.
When the initial supply of opioid increases from a one-day supply to a six-day supply, the likelihood that a person will be using them a year later jumps from 6 percent to 12 percent.
And with a 12-day supply, that figure doubles again to a 24 percent likelihood of a year-long relationship with opioids.
Of course, there are caveats to taking these numbers out of context. More serious conditions would warrant longer initial and long-term painkiller usage. Frankly, any reason for a person to be on a year-long course of opioid treatment is cause for alarm. Further, it’s believed that the effectiveness of opioids to fight pain long term diminishes over time.
"There’s nothing magical about five days versus six days, but with each day your risk of dependency increases fairly dramatically," said the CDC’s Bradley Martin, one of the study’s authors.
The study takes pains to indicate that their assessment of long-term use isn’t to be confused with long-term addiction, but it doesn’t require much in the way of logical gymnastics to realize the longer someone takes an addictive opioid, the risk for addiction rises. As such, if you don’t want a patient to endure the risk of addiction one year from now, is an opioid the best initial treatment, given the rising likelihood that they’ll continue taking the drug?
It’s a question, among many others, that will need to be addressed as we witness the worsening epidemic of opiate and opioid addiction in the United States.
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Pictured: A healthy practice?
Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.