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“The Pain Problem” is — Literally — 1000 Times Worse Than “The Opioid Epidemic”
About 100 million Americans live with chronic pain — myself among them.
If tens of thousands of people dying annually from overdoses is an Epidemic?
The tens of millions of us suffering insufficiently treated pain should be recognized as a Cataclysm — made all the worse by the deafening media silence.
A recent NPR, Morning Edition, piece on the abortion law likely to be signed momentarily by the governor of Alabama (15 May 2019) featured an interview with a physician who said that, because of the legal jeopardy with which it threatens providers, the law would create “the only situation in which a physician has to consider his/her welfare above that of the patient.”
As someone who has been in chronic pain for three decades now, I can certify that this is manifestly untrue.
Can’t Help You in the Office, But There’s an Alley Downtown . . .
We are beginning to get public health studies that ratify what I’ve been saying for years: a majority of opioid overdose deaths (which result overwhelmingly from the use of street drugs, not from prescribed medication, which is very rarely abused) is being caused by patients — people like me — being pushed out of medical settings and into the street.