I am 57 years old and live in Hemet, California. I have suffered from chronic intractable pain for over twenty-five years. The primary causes of my pain are diagnosed as early severe degenerative cervical spine disease, Chiari malformation, spondylosis and subsequent nerve damage, and spinal cord impingement by bone spurs. I have worked with two pain management doctors through all available step therapies without success. Managed pain medication is the only treatment that has afforded me a reasonable quality of life; allowing me to work and volunteer part time.
In 2017, my pain management doctor began reducing my dosages of pain medication and intentionally under-treating my intractable pain. He has admitted that this was medically contraindicated, since my condition is worsening. But pressures from the DEA to comply with CDC dosing “guidelines” are making him taper all his patients regardless of condition or impact on their quality of life.
He fears DEA actions that would lead to prosecution if he treats under prevailing best practices.
In addition, he has shared that scrutiny from the Medical Board of California under the Death Certificate Project has further restricted his ability to provide safe, adequate medical treatment to relieve suffering. His attorney has advised him that deviating from forced tapering of patients could lead to closure of his practice, leaving hundreds of patients with no treatment. He has shared that several of his colleagues have expressed to him a similar concern and many have closed their pain management practices as a result of draconian government regulation.
For me, this unwarranted reduction in pain medication dosing is forcing me into an unbearable quality of life (unrelenting pain, lack of sleep, limited activity, poor appetite, depression). Due to my worsening condition, I have been accepted in a palliative care program with the Visiting Nurses Association. Unfortunately, after eight months I have yet to find a pain management physician who will adequately treat my pain under the palliative care exemption frequently stated in the 2016 CDC guidelines. All of the doctors I have consulted with declared concerns with DEA and Medical Board sanctions as reasons for not providing treatment. Without adequate pain treatment, I will not be able to make the monthly 140 mile round trip to my pain management physician. I will have to quit my part-time job and volunteering and will end up bed-ridden.
Additionally, the pharmacy I have used for over fifteen years has declined to fill my legitimate controlled medication prescriptions, stating that they fear scrutiny from the DEA. Even the administrators for our insurance carrier are interpreting the CDC prescribing guidelines as strict regulations, causing my physician to spend an inordinate amount of time securing medication pre-authorizations and justifying medical diagnosis to people with no medical training. The CDC dosing guidelines state they do not necessarily apply to patients being treated for long-term, chronic pain, and cancer/palliative/hospice patients yet innocent doctors are being bullied and threatened. The broad brush of government regulations and miss-applied guidelines is causing unnecessary suffering for countless, law-abiding intractable pain sufferers. Even cancer patients who only have a short time to live are dying or have died in agony. Intractable pain is very individualized and should be controlled by pain management physicians.
I have stated before and this letter from a pt seems to validate my conclusions. I have always suspected that the CDC was doing some of the “dirty work” for the DEA… because the DEA could never get by with publishing things like the opiate dosing guidelines and many believe that the CDC does not have the statutory authority to do it either… but… so far they have gotten by with this ILLEGAL ACTIVITY…
The end goal – IMO – was to get >50% of the health care community to adopt these guidelines, and once that happened then they could be considered to be the “standard of care” and “best practices” for ALL HEALTHCARE PROVIDERS and it would then be EASY for the DEA to get one of their “experts” to testify against prescribers that the DEA wanted to TAKE DOWN … that they were providing opiates greater than standard of care and best practices suggests is not appropriate… and thus could come to the conclusion that the prescriber was treating/maintaining a person who suffers from opiate use disorder, substance abuse or opiate addict. Seems very easy for the DEA to FABRICATE a story line for a jury to find a prescriber GUILTY.
There is a lot in the news media that is accusing President Trump with the MANUFACTURED CRISIS AT THE BORDER… but they can’t see how the war on drugs seems to be equally MANUFACTURED/FABRICATED since it began in 1970 with the passage of the Controlled Substance Act.
Filed under: General Problems
The Attorneys General pressure the CDC AND the DEA and everyone else including the POTUS. However “opioid crisis” started we now know legitimate pain patients have been completely run over without a sideways glance which means there is positively corruption somewhere and big, BIG.
Whatever good the DOJ was good for, and they WERE good for some things, they are not now because they have come to love the money they can make for themselves above all other things by rewriting established law and loose interpretation or just running over people.
“Opiates”, except Suboxone, the salvation of and proof of the existence of many millions of “addicts”, can not appear to be good for anything or they will not get that billion+ dollar payday from their suits with pharmaceutical manufacturing.
To Charlie Payne – There is a HUGE difference between fulfilling one’s “presidential oath” & fulfilling his ego over a campaign promise he is stuck on – nothing more. I totally RESENT being an unintentional consequences for a flippen wall so he can save face : / This isn’t about anything “noble ” as stopping illegal drugs coming onto our country, it’s about his super inflated EGO.
As far as Obama is concerned, the “presidential pen” has undone just about everything else he did – why didn’t our dear pres. just get rid of the CDC Guidelines with a swift wrist signature? Right ? He could repeal the CDC Guidelines with his signature but he chooses not to because the guidelines are a way to gain support for his WALL.
We are committing Pain Induced Suicide while HE focuses on stopping pain prescriptions by a 1/3 rd, pushed the DEA to stop manufacturing even further this year by another 10% (30% in 2 yrs I believe) making nationwide shortages in hospitals & pharmacies, made ridiculous outlandash videos that were outright lies & very harming to all people in pain, just released that report claiming the CDC was intended for CPP instead of acute pain – which is a lie that will haunt us for a very long time, the bad stuff that he is trying to change in the HIPPA law is just to infurating to write…. this is the man you are sticking up for. Look how he is hurting the CPP -and I am sick of people sticking up for what he is doing to us. ENOUGH ALREADY he will be the death of us all.
Bitching about the CDC guidelines and the drug war without solutions, is futile! Finding solutions where We protect ourselves at the same time the Gov. does, might just end the CDC guideline mess!
I agree that the war on drugs has never really been fought before, until now! I ask this question, how can a war on drugs be fought only on our side of the border and for decades only on American citizens? How in the hell can CP patients get pain medications again to some degree as long as the addiction problem as well as the illicit drugs are pouring in and tens of thousands are dying each year? I suppose we still want the Commander in Chief of our nation to, again, violate their oath of office? “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” — “I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. [So help me God.]” It sure sounds to me that by not securing our borders, mail system and ports of shipping trade, for lack of a better name in my mind, If, as I read, hear, see and believe it has been illicit drugs, mainly fentanyl, that has caused the majority of overdose deaths all along. If, as I saw coming from the beginning and before the CDC guidelines, those guidelines, besides being based on faulty data, should never have been implemented while the fentanyl and other drugs were still flooding into the Country. Do we want the Government, who’s main purpose is to protect and defend the Citizens of our Country from all enemies and enemies kill/murder us to not do everything in their power to stop the drugs being used as a chemical weapon, to not fulfill all of their Constitutional duty and stop the those drugs and the transnational cartels and terrorist groups now before and while possibly finding a solution to pain management prescribing? The current President was not in office when the guidelines were implemented. That’s on Obama! He was a prick, period! I am going to say this for the umpteenth time. Because of the way the guidelines were implemented, that made things worse, the Government, actually cannot relax on opioid guidelines until the flow of illicit drugs, causing the opioid overdose deaths and death caused by other drugs like meth, until the murders are significantly diminished and still fulfill their oath of office! Once that is achieved, and solutions for prescribing pain medications in a safer manner are hashed out, we are stuck! What solutions for achieving pain medication prescribing, in a safer manner can “WE” come up with. I am doing one as we speak. I agreed to make sure that my dear friend who has many medical issues, takes the medications as prescribed, by being in physical control and only letting my friend take them as prescribed! A simple solution. One that her doctor and I came up with! If more parents and friends of chronic pain patients agreed to do that, it would help! Lets find solutions that make sense so we can as the Citizens who the Government is for and not the other way around have less of a reason to infringe on our freedoms while still fulfilling their oaths of office! I have a couple more and I will be getting those suggestions sent to the Gov. and medical community as soon as I go over them with some people I know!
Charlie you are a fool. Anyone who even mention the Constitution w/a straight face at this point after it has torn asunder by both criminal gangs (you probably know them as political parties) and the corporate courts is beyond me. Rather than harp on things done that are unconstitutional one would have a harder time finding something , anything that this CORPORATE GOVT did that adhered to the Constitution. ALL Statutes, regulations and codes by unelected agencies, and incorporated legislative bodies/executive officers/courts/police depts are null and void ACCORDING TO YOUR constitutional common law.
Willingness to submit in a zombie like state to a a system that is entirely antithetical to The one which established this REPUBLIC is the problem. People are too damn stupid to stand up for themselves. What happened while you slept?
http://criminalgovernment.com/docs/emer.html
They are also willing to be split down a line between two criminal gangs aka political parties that ARE MORE SIMILAR THAN DIFFERENT, all over emotional issues like a bunch of lemmings.
Drumpf or Soretaro/Odumbo? Gmafbreak, two banker puppets who never decided one thing in their entire time in office except to read their teleprompter and take a check. No Drumpf (true surname) supporter ever happens to recognize that the same Goldman Sachs flunkies sit in his cabinet that he lambasted Clinton for being a lackey for? Americans are the stupidest body of people on earth, and you sir are a prime example of this fact.
Food those w/a working brain and an idea to look outside of the narrative assigned for you to stay and argue within, you can find out why we are REALLY in this situation? See links.
Anticorruptionsociety.com see interviews and section Lawfully Yours for neophytes who don’t understand how our country has been turned on its head,
Hint: IT’S WITH LEGALESE, CONTRACT LAW, AND A SYSTEM OF ASSUMPTION. YOUr constitution has been replaced with UCC aka Universal COMMERCIAL CODE. (Statutory contract Iaw)
For anyone who reads this and has no idea what I’m talking about please read the links above
You’re crazy. Think about it, while you are correct, I believe about the guidelines not being done while Trump in office, he further hurt the issue by demanding cuts that are hurting millions of ppl and are doing nothing for the real epidemic, illicit fentanyl, etc. Yes they need better pain drugs, better prescribing habits, this all needed to be done before cutting off the millions who depend on these drugs to live, for sanity! Our veterans, pain pts, surgery, cancer, etc., have all been left to wtithe in agony, exist in a torturous life with no future or taking their own lives! The new meds and or treatments are for newer generations of pain pts. To cut off the millions who have taken these meds, had every kind of treatment and alternative meds, etc., is just immoral, unethical, cruel, inhumane and just plain ignorant when you know what is happening and allow it to continue then you are just plain stupid or very definitely have other motives that i’m sure wouldn’t be terribly popular so you use rx drugs as an excuse for stopping all the deaths. You also know it’s been proven that the life saving drugs that have been ripped away from these ppl are not the ones causing the overdoses and deaths. A minute amount cause a minute number of deaths, admitted the cdc after the original numbers were disputed and the new numbers came out!Don’t sit there and sqwack about the presidents (Trump) resposinilities, duties, etc. We all gave him a chance even though questioning ourselves & believeing he would get it together once he got used to being in the top spot. He has been caught numerous times flat out lying on national TV, twitter, etc. Everything that comes out on any media that doesn’t show him in a positive light or points out his own contradictions of comments, etc., made, he calls them fake or other pet names. He is so obvious, cares about votes, his friends (sometimes), family, power & money. He is a bully and throws his tantrums when he doesn’t get his way. I would put every cent I had, betting that if he were in the kind of pain that we suffer, every minute of every day or if one if his loved ones cried to him that they were in agony and couldn’t take it anymore, that they wanted to die, you can bet your sweet petunias he would be pitching a fit because or if< I should say, they couldn't get any pain meds except ibuprofin or tylenol? Just like he & his don't have to worry about ever being poor or homeless as the governmt shut down was causing. The life saving drugs for the pain community being stopped are causing not only death from undertreated or no treatmt of pain, not only death by suicide but homelessness as well because ppl are unable to go to work w/o their meds. unable to care for themselves, let alone family/kids, shop, cook, eat, shower, chores or maintenance, socialize, see a kids play or graduation, see a movie w/a friend, these are all just a few that are made possible or rather made impossible to do or continue to do as a result of stopping their meds! Even tho the guidelines state that cancer, pallitive, end of life care are exempt, we've been telling congress, everyone has been reporting in every way that these folks are unable to get a doc to prescribe or a pharmacy to fill. These ppl are dying earlier maybe due to their disease but probably due to no pain treatmt! It is totally unnecessary & cruel beyond words to let these folks die in agnony.