Palliative care pioneers such as HealthCare Chaplaincy trustee Dr. Kathy Foley, Mary Calloway, Dr. Bal Mount, Dr. Betty Ferrell and others have not only worked to help eradicate physical pain in the lives of people around the world but have sought to keep in front of the world how pervasive and devastating pain is in the lives of so many people.
Clearly, solving this problem is far from simple.
No one denies that the diversion and abuse of legal pain medicines is also a huge problem.
Yet the abuse is not a legitimate excuse to keep people in pain when a remedy is available.
What so many of us fail to appreciate is how huge a public health problem pain is. It not only takes away quality of life from so many but costs economies untold real money.
Even though I know about this problem in my head, I admit that I often find it so difficult to get my hands around it because of its enormity.
Thus I would commend to you this posting on the prominent palliative care blog Pallimed (http://bit.ly/g2ju64) which links to two new short videos at http://bit.ly/fqeAis and http://bit.ly/dLRLWH.
These videos are grim, but are not even close to the experience of those suffering in intractable pain.
They remind us of what an unnecessary scourge pain is.
From my work in the field of substance abuse public education, I can add that two experts strongly agree that abuse and diversion of prescription medications are not a legitimate excuse to keep people in pain when a remedy is available.
ReplyDeleteThese experts are Dr. Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), a component of the National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Service, and Dr. A. Thomas McLellan, Ph.D., director of the Center for Substance Abuse Solutions at the University of Pennsylvania.
On April 5th the National Institute on Drug Abuse reported (http://1.usa.gov/gcqvMP)that in a recent commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Doctors Volkow and McLellan say,“According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, prescription opioid overdose is now the second leading cause of accidental death in the United States, killing more people than heroin and cocaine combined. They also state that this is compelling evidence for the need to develop smart strategies to curtail abuse of opioid analgesics, without jeopardizing pain treatment.”
When I was a program director at The Partnership at Drugfree.org, I worked with Doctors Volkow and McLellan to create public education programs to help parents of adolescents prevent, intervene, and find treatment for teen abuse of prescription medications.
What they say above about “the need to develop smart strategies to curtail abuse of opioid analgesics, without jeopardizing pain treatment” is a message that they have stated consistently and often.