When Portland resident Doris Keene raised her four children, she walked everywhere and stayed active. But when she turned 59, she says, everything fell apart.
"My leg started bothering me. First it was my knees." She ignored the pain, and thinks now it was her sciatic nerve acting up, all along. "I just tried to deal with it," Keene says.
Eventually she went to a doctor, who prescribed Vicodin and muscle relaxants. In 2012, about 1 in 4 Oregonians received an opioid prescription — more than 900,000 people.
The state also currently leads the nation in nonmedical use of opioids, and about a third of the hospitalizations related to drug abuse in Oregon are because of opioids.
Keene says the drugs helped her, but only to a limited degree.
"My body was saying, 'Well, if I take another one, maybe it'll work.' So, I mean, that's just human nature. Especially when you're in the kind of pain I was in. You get to the point after months and months of pain where you're begging for anything — anything — to relieve the pain," she says.
[For more of this story, written by Kristian Fodan-Vencil, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/he...ternative-treatments]
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