New Blog Format for doctordeluca.com
Welcome to the War on Doctors / Pain Crisis blog. I intend this to become a new ‘front-end’ for my Addiction, Pain, and Public Health website aka doctordeluca.com, and for that site to serve a more narrow reference library function containing the Full Text professional (medical and legal, mostly) and journalistic articles that are the historical background and daily bread of (what will be) our discussions here.
The 2006 archival content of this blog (Archives: Feb 2006 - Sept 2006) is identical to that of the War on Doctors and Pain Crisis Weekly RSS feed (and HTML view). The posts prior to this one are the content of that feed in WordPress blog format. I suggest browsing back through them to get a sense of the issues this blog addresses.
I am having the usual trials and tribulations getting major new software up and running, and have already entirely crashed it and have had to re-instal and re-configure WordPress, re-import the archives, etc twice now … but I think I’m getting the hang of it.
Expect glitches and lots of improvements in look-and-feel over the next days. I am anxious to get the damn software stuff done. There are so very many important events, issues and forces coming to a head right now in the War on Docs and the Pain Crisis, so very much to tell you all, that I just want to get started already!
Soon. Till then, stayed tuned…
..alex… Alexander DeLuca, M.D., MPH adeluca@doctordeluca.com
Tags: statistics
Comment by
wfmiii
Great to see the more narrowly focused site! This communication outlet is critical to correcting our government’s inappropriate prosecution of physicians.
Comment by
adeluca
Thank you, wfmiii, for your encouragement.
I’ve been struggling over the past several months about which direction to take with doctordeluca.com. I was getting tired of being a glorified news service.
So I’m hoping this format will help me to become more focused too. I’ve been studying this phenomenon for years and years. I really feel I know this stuff.
I just feel it’s time to concentrate more on speaking clearly and freely about the nightmare, and a little less on documenting and ‘proving’ it’s existence.
Also, wfmiii - YOU ARE #1 - you are the very first to register on this blog site and leave a comment. I’ll remember you for that.
..alex…
Comment by
wfmiii
It is problematic for physicians to complain publicly. It seems like “rich people” whining about their everyday problems and is not well received. This really may have come down to marketing. We have to do a good job educating the public and the rest of the medical community through more effective communication, hence your site.
The truth is what it is and we have that on our side. The larger challenge seems to be countering the War On Drugs’ marketing/propaganda machine. They have so successfully and thoroughly demonized pain that it has become what depression, anxiety, bipolar D/O, schizophrenia, etc used to be…taboo. Patients these days seem better off claiming to be addicted to opioids, heroin, alcohol, etc. from the outset rather than trying to have their chronic, non-malignant pain effectively managed.
Bill
Comment by
adeluca
Agree with everything you say, Bill.
Another aspect of the problem physicians, specifically pain/substance abuse docs, have with effectively communicating with the public is fear of being targeted by the DEA if they rise to the level of perception, so to speak.
The non-medical laity need to understand that ALL it takes to initiate a DEA investigation of a physician is a complaint; ANY complaint, including anonymous ones. Further adding to the stress is that it is impossible to rationally assess the risk of speaking out. DEA does not publish the criteria on which it’s targeting process is based.
I personally experienced this awful dilemma. Circa 2000-2001 I was in solo practice, no longer under the wing of a major corporate medical center, and a significant number of my chronic pain patients were “high risk” having histories of alcohol or other substance abuse. I began lurking on pain advocacy listServs, and after a while I wanted to participate. And I did — but I became increasingly anxious about my outspokenness, and even a little paranoid that law enforcement agents of disrepute (with the power to crush me like a bug) had infiltrated the listServ and that I would be punished.
The experience of censoring myself from professional discourse with my peers, because I was afraid a policeman might disapprove, became increasingly intolerable. Ultimately I left clinical practice in order to be able to SPEAK.
Thanks Bill,
..alex…