More proof

All of us who have not made a career out of spending vast amounts of money to conclude the obvious have clearly wasted our lives.

What...there's a link between chronic pain and suicide? No, really? How much did it cost to figure that out? And, having figured it out, why is it that these Einsteins can't figure out why chronically ill people kill themselves?

With the Beast knocking on the door again, this topic gets to be a staple of my daily introspection. Medicine does not want to fix many forms of chronic pain, but it does want to prevent people with chronic pain from fixing it for themselves. Medicine offers medication that turns them into marionettish travesties of the human beings they were. This supposedly makes them better, and adds another half dozen pills to the daily regimen. I take 18 a day, which seems like quite enough.

For people with intractable chronic pain, suicide is just a treatment option. If you want to think of suicide as something to prevent, more pills don't help: only taking away the pain helps.

Giving the chronically ill their lives back seems like a solution to me...but I don't make my living off grants, so what do I know?