I hear that a lot especially from people who have never suffered from chronic pain on a daily basis. I had back surgery and they did a 4-5 lumbar fusion. They completely removed a disk and installed a cage with cadaver bone and installed rods and screws to fuse the bone together. I was supposed to be fixed and pain free. I have never been the same and I have chronic back, leg and foot pain 24/7 365 that makes sleeping extremely difficult and limits everything I do. They (the V.A.) will not help me and when I did take pills some time ago, I was treated like crap by anyone in the medical field who knew it. If I could somehow transfer my pain into my doctors body for a few hours, he would be throwing prescriptions at me.
I'm sorry to hear about your condition and treatment. Perhaps it's just the loss of context that comes from words typed on the internet, but you sound a little bitter about my words. I'd like to clarify first that I only said that opioids should be a last resort for chronic pain. The body becomes habituated to them and they lose their effectiveness. This means that they require larger and larger doses at more frequent intervals to achieve a similar pain relieving effect. Eventually, they do very little, and all the person is left with is their unrelieved pain, new dependency, and negative personality changes that go along with it.
Certainly, medications such as Lyrica, neurontin, amitriptyline etc should be explored first as they don't carry the same negative consequences (although they of course have their own). Sometimes revision surgery can be considered.
Chronic pain is a horrible sentence. Often, there is no great solution.
I can also tell you that I've spent time at several VAs and had a clinic where I was an attending one day a week. There are many, many great doctors at the VAs I've spent time at. I've only been to VAs associated with some of the nation's premier teaching institutions where most of the attendings were associated with those institutions (and not just the VA system), so my experience is skewed, but I can tell you with certainty, your experience is not universal. Many if not most physicians care deeply about their patients. Their decision making may be obfuscated by the system or being overworked, but often times, there is a lot that goes into it and this may not always be intuitive.