Pain Awareness Month - Allowing Doctors to Treat Patients
Chronic and intractable pain afflicts over 60 million Americans. It is a pervasive problem throughout modern society. The individuals who suffer from chronic pain have faded into the background as the opioid overdose crisis has taken over headlines.
September is Pain Awareness Month and I would like to put a spotlight on the multi-faceted issue that is chronic pain.
Chronic Pain Patients Face Limitations
Patients facing chronic and intractable pain have many limitations in their day-to-day living. Frequently they cannot even get out of bed without severe pain. This limits their ability to hold down a job, and even to perform tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and yard work.
Treating pain, like much of modern medicine, is a process to find what is effective for each individual patient. For some patients effective surgical procedures exist. For others there are no known viable procedures available for their ailment yet and prescription opioids remain the best stable form of pain reduction therapy.
The Opioid Epidemic
The opioid crisis complicated the treatment for pain patients dependent upon opioids for their well-being. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) Guidelines published in 2016 were designed as guidelines for prescribing in an effort to reduce opioid related deaths by overdose. Since these guidelines were introduced, opioid prescriptions have been reduced by 60%. Unfortunately, this has not had the desired effect on the opioid epidemic. The opioid epidemic has gotten worse and many pain patients have been collateral damage as they have been tapered to arbitrary lower dosage prescriptions or force tapered off the very prescriptions that have helped alleviate their pain conditions. The American Medical Association stated in 2021 that the guidelines have been devastating for patients with pain and urged removal of arbitrary thresholds.
Minnesota Legislation Signed into Law
This last session, I authored the bill to help Interventional Pain Physicians do their work and chronic pain sufferers to be treated as individuals when it comes to prescription opioids. Diagnosed pain patients, palliative care patients, rare disease and cancer patients are supposed to be exempt from forced tapering.
This bill, which passed both chambers with bipartisan support and was signed into law by the Governor, is about letting medical doctors do their work. It is also about keeping legislators and bureaucracy from making medical decisions.
Forcing people to live with pain is not good health care. We need to make sure trained pain physicians are allowed to treat their patients with opioids when medically necessary and the benefits outweigh the risks.
Thank you for reading! You can read our next blog on Oct. 9th!