From experience, I've learned that the job of doctors is to prolong life above all else, rather than improve the quality of it/make things more bearable. To a lot of people this would seem paradoxical, as they assume doctors can treat the root cause of many pathologies and cure them for good, and do not realise that certain ailments are chronic issues that need to be managed throughout someone's lifetime.
The concepts of health and happiness seem to be deemed mutually exclusive to a lot of healthcare workers. Pain is a virtue in many cultures, after all, but a lot of healthcare workers take this to the extreme and think patients exaggerate or lie about pain for attention, and need to be "tougher" despite this logic being complete nonsense. And even if it wasn't, if someone was truly seeking attention, doesn't that indicate an underlying issue that's being neglected?
You're completely right that it's a kind of legal tip toeing around regulations and liability game for them. No matter where you are in the world, this seems to happen in healthcare settings, I've noticed. A lot of doctors, nurses, and therapists also want to impose their own beliefs and ideas onto patients, so they foolishly posture that *they* could handle certain situations or levels of pain, so the patient should be able to. A false equivalency.
I sympathize with you a lot, because I also have chronic back pain, and tried lots of things for it that don't help at all. The only thing that touches the pain when it gets bad is low level opiates, but of course I'm "too young for that." People seriously underestimate how badly it hurts if you have a spinal issue and downplay it. The difference between having strong painkillers and not is like night and day.
Yeah, opioids can become addicting and have the potential for danger in certain contexts. Yet, many other substances are the same, with far less medicinal value (i.e. alcohol). But the priorities of doctors and politicians are completely mixed up if they are more worried about chemical dependency than subjecting people to decades of hell with intractable pain, with no hope for anything to manage it with. The demonisation of opioids feels like a psy op.