Posts Tagged With: addiction

Unrelieved pain has a devastating impact on the physical, emotional, social, and economic well being of patients and their families. Diagnosing and treating pain is, therefore, fundamental to the public health. Terminology is review, myths identified, and medical understanding is stated.

The article well describes the public health chaos this is the predictable consequence of clinical and public health authorities abandoning their real mission to uphold the medical standard of care for their citizenry, and instead focusing exclusively on the policeman’s agenda which prioritizes ‘catching a few addicts’ over providing adequate pain management for legions of innocent patients.

Article by Dr. DeLuca regarding Jacob Sullum\’s comments about a recent SAMHSA analysis showing low addiction rates for most substances of abuse, and also discusses Hurwitz\’ excellent 2005 analysis of Government data, the peer reviewed

Blog post about an example of war on doctors Trash Journalism, which is analyzed. Excerpt: “So what is the message? Well one clear message to me is that the line between pain patient and ‘addict’ – that pitiable dregs of humanity; the walking dead; that criminal scourge; is thin and vague. In fact it is presented as the slippery slope if not an inevitability – people on chronic opioid therapy are, or will become, addicts. Pain patient, drug addict, who cares? Drug are bad, people who use them are bad, you and I are better than that; they deserve what …

Blog post about the case of U.S.A. v Dr. Rosa Martinez by Dr. Alexander DeLuca, defense medical expert. Case involves federal overreaching, and groundless charges that Dr. Martinez was drug criminal instead of the caring family doctor caring for her chronic pain patients entirely up to the medical standard of care for pain management.

Blog post drawing attention to Radley Balko’s late August article on Fox website which is a very thorough review of this important case in the modern war on doctors. See the Rottschaefer archives linked to above for key legal briefs in addition to high points in the journalistic record. Links to archives on Dr. Hurwitz, Dr. McIver.

Blog post featuring link to Associated Press video of Siobhan Reynolds talking about the life and death of her husband Sean Greenwood in 2007. Footage is part of AP’s ‘World of Pain’ package released Aug 2007. This entry also provides links to 3 other videos featuring the PRN. 1: Siobhan, Ronan, Dr. Coles, Dr. Siegle on Mike and Juliet show (Fox); 2: James Fernandez, veteran, talks about his military career and life severely limited by undertreated chronic pain; and 3: The Chilling Effect – documentary by S. Reynolds about her family, and the family of Richard and Linda Paey.

Blog post about a Letter to the Editor (LTE) to an Alabama paper entitled, ‘Answer to methadone is God’. Begins, “What is interesting about the LTE reprinted in full below, is that the writer, a nurse, is describing behavior that any reasonable person can imagine, and would excuse, a chronically undermedicated person with severe chronic pain for displaying. [...]”

Newspaper article focusing on Siobhan Reynolds, founder and President of the Pain Relief Network (PRN) and her life experience of trying to get decent medical care for a husband in chronic pain, while raising a child and founding a movement for social change – the Pain Relief advocacy movement.

See the more recent, PRN in ‘World of Pain’… Videos, which includes a superset of the links and resources in this post.

Blog post about a Continuing Medical Education (CME) course based solely on one interesting and flawed article about the prevalence of addiction in primary care chronic pain patients treated with chronic opioid therapy.

Reuters UK reports on recent research on substance use disorders in a population of chronic pain patients receiving daily opioid analgesic medications for at least 3 months. The subjects were 801 patients from 235 different family practices with “severe, incapacitating, [non-cancer] pain. 3.8 percent met the clinical criteria for opioid use disorder, compared with a rate of 0.9 percent reported in the general population. The elephant-in-the-living-room question is “what percent met clinical criteria for successful titration of medication to satisfactory analgesic effect,” but NIDA et al. haven’t even bothered to define the phenomena of “good pain relief” nor invented a …

Wow. “Drug addiction” must be as bad as being “gassed at Aushwitz, slaughtered in Armenia, raped in Rwanda.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. But. It. Isn’t. Oh how we love to dramatize “addiction.” Everybody is an expert – and exactly to that extent the word and concept have become meaningless. Which doesn’t stop drug war prosecutors putting juries with no medical training in the position of deciding life and death, literally, on the basis of a distinction not even medical experts can make with assurance: the difference between a ‘drug seeker’ and a ‘pain patient.’

Evidence for Controlled Heroin Use? (full text) Shewan and Dalgarno, British J. Health Psychology, 2005. Posted: 2006-02-17. Comment (DeLuca): In this study, subjects had occupational and educational status comparable to that of general UK pop. Ongoing problems were rare; heroin was not a significant predictor. Use frequency data suggests importance psych factors. The pharmacological properties of opioids, per se, do not inevitably lead to harmful use patterns. See also: Occasional and Controlled Heroin Use – Not a Problem? – Warburton et al., report from The Rowntree Foundation, 2005. Some Eminent Narcotics Addicts, and: The Heroin Overdose Mystery – Edward Brecher; Chapters 5 …