I came across this in my inbox and thought it might be of interest to many of us:
It is from the Anesthesiology News

Commentary
FEBRUARY 29, 2016
My Country Is Failing Me: A Call to Action for the Pain Community
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Lynn R. Webster, MD

When some people see media segments about physicians advocating for access to pain medications, they frequently ask questions, such as Why do you doctors promote opioids? The answer is, we dont. The point has never been to advocate for opioids but to find the best way to relieve the unimaginable levels of pain suffered by some patients. The truth is, some patients require the use of opioids long term, a fact acknowledged even by many of the most vocal opioid critics.

Too often, the voices of people living with chronic pain go unheard. This is not acceptable. Take a look at one of the reader comments on my blog, posted by a 64-year-old chronic pain sufferer and edited for length and clarity:

As a chronic pain patient for over 10 years, I am sad that doctors feel we abuse our medications. I have had every treatment: needles burning my nerves, transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation, epidural therapy and more. I have arthritis. This is in the joints, so when the numbing of the nerves didnt work, this was no surprise. I was prescribed ibuprofen 800 mg a day. It gave me a bleeding ulcer that almost killed me.

This reader then questioned why the government should function as her babysitter, keeping her from the only medication that kept her working and off welfare: hydrocodone 10 mg four times a day. Her friend, who suffered with lupus, took her own life because the pain became too much to bear. When the suicide rate exceeds [the overdose rate], then what? my reader poignantly ended her post.

Compassion, Common Sense Lacking

Such stories are legion, as you can see if you briefly scan my blog. Yet many law and policymakersand now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)seem to be deaf to the cries of people in pain. It is understandable that there is a call for greater effort to curb opioid addiction and a need for more studies to fully understand long-term effectiveness and side effects. However, many people in pain are becoming collateral damage to these efforts. The recently released Draft CDC Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain (www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/prescribing/guideline.html), for example, advises clinicians to avoid daily opioid doses that exceed the 90-mg morphine-equivalent dose. However, some patients do well on doses that exceed that level; others do poorly on any opioid dose. The point is, how can anyone tell my blog readers and millions like them that they should do without their medication because there is no evidence that opioids help them? Where is the compassion or sense of humanity? Where is the common sense?

Because I refuse to abandon patients when they are at their most vulnerable, Ive been mistakenly told that I have pity for people in pain, and that pity is dangerous. What I have is empathy. Denying treatment for a certain subset of the population for whom opioids are the only option is cruel and inhumane. We have reached a tragic point: Physicians are now afraid to prescribe even for patients who have been compliant and functional on opioids for years.

Patients turn to the medical community for relief, treatment and support, and yet we have no answers. The current climate forces physicians to shrug their shoulders at the subset of patients who do well on opioids from among the more than 100 million people who suffer from chronic pain. As a physician who has seen countless patients and their family members struggle with chronic pain, I find that demonizing a class of drugs that has the potential to diminish the suffering of people in pain goes against every fiber in my body, as a physician and a human being.

But dont take my word for it. Listen to the people who live the nightmare of pain every day. In the comment section of my blog, a medical service corps officer in the U.S. Army, who survived war, described his continuing fight for survival. Suffering from debilitating pain caused by a spinal cord tumor that causes compression and nerve displacement, he despaired, I cant get any relief: Today at management I had acupuncture needles shoved into my ears. Really? For spinal cord tumor pain?

This soldier is studying to be a physician, so he can help others. Unfortunately, his pain treatment regimen is now at an impasse, where he can neither find a physician to treat his pain with medications nor anyone to do surgery, which several neurosurgeons have already told him is too risky anyway.

What am I supposed to do? he asks, sounding desperate. I can die for my country, but when it comes to treating my serious health condition, my country is failing me.

It is for this reason I am asking the pain community to collectively launch a national campaign to make our politicians and government agencies aware of the magnitude of the pain problem and the lack of effective, safe and covered treatment options. The CDC has done this for people who have been harmed by prescription drugs by asking for six-word stories (www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/media/index.html); no doubt, these people deserve to tell their stories. Similarly, people who are being harmed through lack of access to their necessary opioid medications also deserve to tell their stories. They, too, deserve to be heard in the halls where policy is made and to reach a wider audience through the media.

The goal is that 100,000 letters be written to U.S. Congress (find your senators and representatives at www.opencongress.org/people/zipcodelookup) and the CDC (find the address here: www.cdc.gov/contact/), asking for a change in attitudes toward people in pain, for improved access to treatments and for a voice that is heard when actions are taken to curb the opioid abuse problem. Please ask your patients who are suffering to participate. You can find templates of letters on my website LynnWebsterMD.com or at ThePainfulTruthBook.com. Copy your letterand ask your patients to do the sameto the reader comment section of the blog on my website, so we will all know when we have reached letter 100,000.

Lets begin the movement! Unite your and your patients voices, and refuse to go unheard any longer.