This is a great article from the Daily Mail in the UK. The picture painted here is much the same as in Australia and places like Canada, New Zealand and the US.

What is needed is a totally different approach to pain from the medical profession and an end to the reliance on prescribing these highly dangerous drugs.

Some other excerpts of the article…
What do we do? Moan at the doctor about our ‘constant pain’. With a queue of people in the waiting room and ten minutes to listen to our story, more and more of them hand out a prescription for these strong painkillers. A few months later — when these pills stop working (as they inevitably will) — we go back, moan again and get the dose doubled.

Doctors haven’t got the time or resources to treat pain any differently. The majority of people I know over 80 are now on a cocktail of opioids — a chemical cosh that just isn’t working and, if taken in high doses, reduces users to zombies.

There are now an estimated 30,000 people in the UK addicted to codeine. One expert who runs a pain clinic says she sees patients who are taking ten times the recommended dose

At the Lifestyle Pain Clinic we are doing many different things with innovative treatments that are leading the way in releasing persistent pain sufferers from their chains. We recently ran a seminar as part of National Pain Week, the title being Eliminate Pain <=> Restore Function.  One of the attendees, John applied some of the information resulting in the end of 27 years of persistent pain.