People actually in need will most likely get medicines to help treat the pain, usually all non narcotic options will be tried first and opiates really are the last alternative.
That doesn't match my experience at all. My experience was a lot of GP's telling me to take panadol and 'you're young, it'll go away, you'll be fine.'(I am, but it didn't and I wasn't). I also wasted a lot of money seeing a physiotherapist for a year, which did jack shit. When I finally managed to get a referral to a pain management specialist with a 3 month wait list (despite the fact that he managed to fit me in weekly after I'd first seen him) and an absurd fee (by which point I had started self medicating, first with OTC codeine pills, then CWE's, and over the course of two years stepped up to IV oxycodone/morphine obtained through drug contacts), I went in completely honest about my drug use, past and present, and saying that I didn't expect him to prescribe opiates given the situation (any dose he would have been willing to prescribe would have been useless with my tolerance anyway).
Despite that his first recourse was to put me on opioid maintenance, saying that suboxone would manage my pain and addiction (at that point I was a frequent user, but not a daily one for a financial reasons - roughly 2 days out of 3). I refused, as turning up to a pharmacy daily was an impossibility with my recently obtained job, but asked if he had any other suggestions. He told me to come back in a week, at which point he hooked me up to some machine which was wired to my back and supposed to interact with nerves to decrease pain somehow, with no results. When I went back to tell him the machine hadn't worked, I asked if he'd be willing to try pregabalin (which he had to look up). He wrote me a script, then, after asking me to pull my sleeves up so he could see my track marks (when I'd just told him how much I'd been injecting recently), tried to push me onto suboxone again.
I told him again that I wasn't willing to give up being gainfully employed for the first time in a year, but suggested that a decent compromise would be the buprenorphine patches, as they would both prevent the use of other opiates, reduce the pain (he was very confident in the analgesic potential of bupe - overconfident, as it turned out) and allow me to turn up to work. He turned me down by saying the dose would be too low, which seemed reasonable, but then launched into a lecture about how he couldn't treat me unless I "submitted to the suboxone management," (how, I don't know, since he didn't seem to have any idea of how to treat pain other than prescribe opioids), closing with a reminder to make sure I paid my fee on the way out.
He then went and wrote a letter to my referring doctor saying that I had "attempted to bargain for drugs" and "exhibited drug seeking behavior" (by asking for a lower dose of the exact medication he wanted to give me!) and again that the only way he could treat me further was if I would "submit" to the suboxone program. At no point in this process did he actually show any interest or offer any insight regarding the cause of the pain.
So in short I waited 2 years and saw at least 4 different GP's to get a referral, waited 3 months, spent over a thousand dollars on someone who obviously had no idea how to treat pain other than with opioids, treated me like scum because in 2 years of severe pain I'd turned to self medication to allow me to work and sleep (which yes, eventually did turn into a psychological addiction to the euphoric effects as well - opiates feel awesome - but even when I had no opiates I trashed my stomach lining with paracetemol and ibuprofen, not to mention the other assorted "treatments" I tried, and I would never have touched codeine, let alone harder opiates, in the first place if I hadn't started buying them for my back), accused me of drug seeking when I asked for a slightly different formulation of the same drug he first suggested so I could retain my job.
The sick irony of it all is if it had been a woman in her 40's in the exact same situation, she would have been diagnosed with fibromyalgia or somesuch on the first GP appointment, given a script for endone and a referral to pain management and ended up being prescribed increasingly high doses of strong opiates by the PM doctor until her opioid habit exceeded the one I obtained self medicating. I've seen it happen. But if you're young and male, 99% of doctors won't give you more than a box or two of panadeine forte for anything less than a bone poking out of your skin or a vertebra crushed to powder.
In the end I lost the job anyway because of the situation (fair enough, I was either high, sick or in pain - not a good worker), tried suboxone as a last resort (my saint of a shrink went through the qualification process herself when I couldn't find anyone willing to prescribe it), and with a copious intake of paracetemol and ibuprofen I managed to keep the pain in control enough to function, but it wasn't until I gave up on the medical establishment entirely and took up meditation, followed by chi kung and then tai chi (with acupuncture treatments from my tai chi teacher) that the pain actually reduced significantly (some days it's not there at all, for the first time in half a decade, other days I need to pop a few panadol or nurofen, but compared to where I was back in 2010/2011 it's night and day).
I have no idea why the "alternative" treatments (although they actually have some strong scientific backing, which I only found out when I was able to overcome my inherent skepticism) I took up in desperation when all the mainstream options had failed me actually managed to help more than all the doctors and pills and physiotherapy and nerve stimulation combined, but it did.
Anyway, I know that's just one person's experience, maybe I just happened across the half dozen shittiest doctors (and single best psychiatrist) in the city by some really fucked up turn of chance. I don't know, but I think it's unlikely, especially from what I've heard from other people.
