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"DEAth" for disabled pain-sufferers
Question: What is the greatest barrier to proper healthcare for most people suffering from chronic pain or debilitating injuries?
Answer: The United States Drug Enforcement Administration.
Date: 3/8/2005 3:33:28 PM ( 19 y ) ... viewed 2982 times "DEAth" for disabled pain-sufferers
March 7, 2005
Question: What is the greatest barrier to proper healthcare for most people suffering from chronic pain or debilitating injuries?
Answer: The United States Drug Enforcement Administration.
Picture if you will: You were born with some genetic malformations, as well as hereditary traits that progressively worsened as you have aged. In spite of all these infirmities, you are an extremely intelligent and personally powerful person, and have not allowed them to stop you from pursuing your dreams and destinies. Then, for a period from your late teens into your early thirties, you've experienced a combination of excruciating headaches and other body pains, and have spent your life since mostly searching for some relief for either.
After much frustration and very little help from any conventional medical source, you discover (via alternative-healing contacts) a pain-management specialist truly worthy of the name. At the same time, your headache problem is being diagnosed, and is found to be yet another genetic inheritance: Arnold-Chiari Malformation (which simply put means your skull is either not large enough or the wrong shape to comfortably house your rather advanced brain).
A complicated surgery is performed by a world-renowned and then-highly-respected neurosurgeon, which does some good, but by now you're also dealing with the combined anguish of fibromyalgia and myofascial pain syndrome, along with those congenital defects, which have only gotten worse with age. The only good news is, the pain management specialist has prescribed a daily dose of Kadian (morphine capsules), along with several lesser medications; at least the pain is a little dulled, though most people would find it still horribly excruciating.
Then, another brain surgery is recommended (by the same cutter as before), and although your pain specialist recommends against it, you submit to the knife again. However, this time the procedure (since proclaimed unnecessary by a neurosurgeon-turned-attorney) is badly botched, adding more ailments, including arachnoiditis, to the mix. Now even the morphine is only partially effective, but at least it allows for some relief from the screaming pain otherwise. You take your pills as prescribed, each morning before you try to do anything more, to give them a chance to take effect and allow you to be functional every now and then.
Enter the Drug Enforcement Administration. Your pain specialist doctor can only prescribe so large a dose, lest he be put under their microscope for investigation for … "drug-trafficking"! Witness the recently concluded fiasco with Dr. William E. Hurwitz, the McLean, Virginia pain-specialist who tried to help his patients cope with the pain of their chronic ailments, and got "stung" by a beartrap of undercover cops with phony ailments and sad fictitious stories. He has now not only been put out of his medical practice (since August, 2002), but is in the midst of a long prison sentence -- up to life, perhaps -- having been convicted on these "drug-trafficking" charges.
Moreover, your prescriptions for each medication are tightly controlled, so that in each two-week or one-month period they must not be refilled until the day after the previous ones run out -- and never a moment sooner. If there is any delay in delivering each allotment of medicines, you must go without until it (or they) arrive(s). Life is thus lived in two- and four-week clumps, not as a continuous existence like most folks.
Being now officially disabled, and mostly bedridden since that botched surgery, you must rely on a loyal friend/angel to go pick up your prescriptions. If that friend cannot find them all in stock at the first pharmacy, it may take half the day tracking down each one in turn, all around the city; it's even possible that one or more may NOT be obtainable that day. If so, you won't get the meds you need, and will get to spend that day in complete agony, with no recourse but to suffer until the prescription can be filled.
The DEA's argument, of course, is that they need to monitor and control these medicines, because … Well, what if someone who's NOT in constant pain were to get hold of them! Why they might actually get HIGH off the pill, or even take enough to cause serious harm to themselves!! Can't have that, so we have to tightly straitjacket the people who, without these painkillers, are just a throbbing lump of PAIN; gotta stop that drugrunning at all costs! (The reality is, if someone NOT in constant pain were to take even a couple of these pills, they might prove to be a lethal overdose! That fact seems not to concern the drug thugs whatsoever.)
It doesn't matter that you've been taking these things -- month after month and year after year, at roughly the same dosage -- and have NEVER either lost some to a street-junkie, or tried to sell them yourself on the market. In actuality, without these pills your life is just a step away from your choosing to end it yourself; the last thing you want to do is share them with the world! But because you might, and because some do, and because the DEA has to justify those budgets (and those civil rights violations) to Congress … you can't be allowed even a single extra dose … until that prescription has absolutely run out! And even then you require another prescription from your doctor; there are "no refills" on the really effective forms of narcotic pain medication.
The result is, you must rely on multiple pharmacy-branches (and your dear friend's constancy, persistence and love) just to keep your body-pain at a tolerable level, one well above "comfort" but which you have come to accept as part of your daily life. Meanwhile, whenever an external ailments strike you (which happens easily, thanks to the lowered immune-system this constant agony has fostered), so that you must bear even more agony as a result, there are only a strictly limited supply of weapons with which to combat those extra aches and pains; should you try to secure anything additional to alleviate these other conditions, you're very likely to be turned down, with the mere attempt added to your insurance records -- as an excuse for future harassment or denial of services.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media, shills that they clearly are for the "official sources," continue to highlight the alleged abuses of the system by patients, thus deflecting attention from interventionism by bureaucrats and uniformed thugs. A story just this past weekend, on a Nashville, Tennessee TV station ("Couple arrested for TennCare fraud, selling meds") seems to imply that TennCare patients can: (a) easily obtain whatever medications they wish to, and (b) sell their excess painkillers on the black market to drug-seeking junkies or thrillseekers, as many as they wish. It also tends to support claims that this is why the DEA must continue its insane War on Drugs, particularly in the prescription area.
The reality is far different, as you (our not so hypothetical chronic-pain sufferer) would be quick to point out. Meanwhile, you are forced to spend hours on the phone or online, seeking to create a secure network of physicians, pharmacies and insurers who will simply support you in maintaining the bit of life you do have, and allow you to move on with it. Is this any way to live in the land of opportunity?
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