A refreshingly honest artice on chronic pain in yesterday’s NY Times

Pain management is not generally taught as a part of medical education, not even to residents in orthopedic surgery. As a result, most doctors are clueless or unnecessarily cautious about treating pain, especially chronic pain like that caused by incurable neurological or muscular disorders.

They are especially ill-informed about opioids, which are synthetic versions of morphine, the most potent painkillers that can be taken by mouth.

As Dr. Jennifer P. Schneider writes about opioids in her book “Living With Chronic Pain” (Healthy Living Books, $15.95), “Fear and lack of knowledge of these drugs prevent many doctors from prescribing them for people whose pain is caused by anything other than cancer.”

Yet, she continues, in 1995 The Journal of the American Medical Association lamented the reluctance of physicians to prescribe needed pain medication. The journal stated: “Bringing about significant change may depend on empowering patients to demand adequate pain treatment. This empowerment will not come easily, especially if opioids must be used for pain relief and if the pain is of a nonmalignant origin.”

Pay attention, current and future patients. The journal’s message is really for you: Learn what you can about pain control and insist that experts in treating pain help you through it.

Unfortunately public fear about opioids, combined with an ever more vigilant and agressive drug war, is making it more and more difficult for even the most educated pain patients to find doctors who will treat them. Those doctors are either being arrested, having their assets seized in civil court by the government, getting their medical licenses revoked, are retreating from palliative therapy out of fear any of those things might happen.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 16th, 2005 at 10:41 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Pain Treatment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.