Lastly, thank you for the input and for sharing your story.

The question is, was Paula taking them for her RSD, or was she taking them for other reasons? I’m not an Idol fan, but I’ve heard how spacey and odd she can be, so I assume she’s been taking them in higher doses than she should have been. People who are on the correct dosage of painkillers don’t appear spacey or stoned. I hope Paula deals with her issues, and I hope her RSD is in remission or whatever it might be. Because if it’s not, what else can she do for the pain but go back on painkillers? It’s a difficult problem.

In the UK, do they refer to drugs that need a physician’s prescription as “over the counter” – as in they’re kept out of the reach of the public and have to be handed “over the counter” by the pharmacist?

Yes, it’s a fairly generic term here and the health system in no way resembles the US one. I use it to mean little more than where it is physically kept in the store (behind the counter where the public cannot pocket it, next to the throat drops).

It’s not a strict term, per se, and does not necessarily relate to a prescription (this along with drug availability/ branding and use could vary to some extent too). The general idea is that the person behind the counter would have to then check amount you could physically access and advise per the label – verbally.

In the UK, do they refer to drugs that need a physician’s prescription as “over the counter” – as in they’re kept out of the reach of the public and have to be handed “over the counter” by the pharmacist? Because in the US “over the counter” means you can just walk in and buy them – Tylenol, Advil, aspirin, etc. Trying to figure out how she could get addicted to over-the-counter stuff.

(And now I’m trying to figure out why we use “over the counter” to mean the exact opposite of what it seems like it *should* mean…)

I had a friend who had RSD, and man, that shit will FUCK A BODY UP. She had flares sometimes so bad that she was literally crying all day long, nonstop – and that was WITH the OxyContin and the Fentanyl patches. It was unreal; she was suicidal for months because she didn’t believe the pain would ever stop and no amount of medicine they could give her, short of IV morphine, could even take the edge off.

I feel for Paula – but I’d have a lot more sympathy if she’d been honest from the get-go. Conventional wisdom says you can’t get “addicted” if you take pain meds as prescribed, but (1) that’s not always true and (2) even if you don’t develop a *psychological* addiction, you can still become *physically* dependent and have the type of detox experience she talks about. It doesn’t *always* indicate abuse or irresponsible behavior – she could have done a lot to raise awareness if she’d been honest from the start. Of course, if she’s *acting* like she’s got something to hide, then probably she’s got something to hide, so…