Yet Freddie Oversteegen and her sister Truus, two years her senior, were rare exceptions — a pair of teenage women who took up arms against Nazi occupiers and Dutch “traitors” on the outskirts of Amsterdam. With Hannie Schaft, a onetime law student with fiery red hair, they sabotaged bridges and rail lines with dynamite, shot Nazis while riding their bikes, and donned disguises to smuggle Jewish children across the country and sometimes out of concentration camps.
In perhaps their most daring act, they seduced their targets in taverns or bars, asked if they wanted to “go for a stroll” in the forest — and “liquidated” them, as Ms. Oversteegen put it, with a pull of the trigger. (source)
Many chronic pain patients already know how difficult it is to find a new doctor. In PNN’s recent survey of nearly 6,000 pain patients, nearly three out of four (72%) said it is harder to find a doctor willing to treat their chronic pain.
“Two doctors refused to see me. I have no quality of life and I’m confined to bed. No one will help me,” one patient told us.
“It’s to the point mentioning you need pain relief makes health care professionals look at you as an addict. Hell, when I have tried to get help for my pain and told the doctor I don’t want opioids I still get a suspicious look,” another patient said.
Over a third of patients (34%) in our survey said they’ve been abandoned by doctors and 15 percent said they haven’t been able to find a doctor at all.
A novel study by researchers at the University of Michigan confirms many of our findings. Using a “secret shopper” method, researchers posing as the adult children of patients taking the opioid Percocet called primary care clinics in Michigan to see if they could schedule an appointment for their parent. The callers also said their “parent” was taking medications for high blood pressure and high cholesterol.
79 of the 194 clinics that were called – about 40 percent – said they would not accept a new patient who was taking opioids, no matter what kind of health insurance they had.
Less than half of the clinics (41%) were willing to schedule an initial appointment and 17 percent said they needed more information before making a decision. (Read more at link)
Most PCPs will refer you out to a pain clinic, but the problem is that many pain clinics will not prescribe meds. Instead they want you to come in and get a shot every couple weeks and/or do physical therapy. My uncle has severe chronic pain issues and is unable to walk, so he’s well beyond the point of being able to do physical therapy. In order to get the medication he needs to at least dull the pain, he has to drive over 4 HOURS from Northwest Ohio to a pain clinic in Northern Kentucky.
I’m sure that’s incredibly frustrating. In my experience it’s been no meds on the first visit after they evaluate and drug test you. Either way I’m sure plenty pain clinics got scared. I do get a shot in my back to but it was something I asked for, and not an get one for the other situation. But I get sciatica relief from my shots so they’re worth it.
There should be like a disability review so people can rate pain clinics so you know if they’ll fully treat your pain.
Guys, this is such a double-edged sword. We (as healthcare providers) have gotten ourselves into this situation where it’s incredibly difficult to know when and where to prescribe opiates, and to which patients they should be prescribed. For every decision that a physician makes, there has to be a weighing of risks and benefits. With opiates, many physicians are saying the risk is too great, and I don’t think they’re wrong. The fact of the matter is that we need new mechanisms for pain control that are safer and better regulated. Until that time, chronic pain and the need for opiates needs to be managed by specialists who are trained in opiate prescription and management, i.e. pain clinics and pain doctors. Yes, the system needs improvement, but no, the answer is not to have all doctors manage chronic pain. That’s how we end up with the opiate epidemic.
Absolute bullshit. You should be ashamed of yourself, you’re part of the problem and part of the reason people are dying from pain that responds to opioids. There is absolutely no excuse to not treat pain. Check your oath.
I’m a chronic pain patient. I had a tumor (an intradural extramedullary schwanoma) removed from my spine in 2013. For 5 years after that, I had the same PCP and pain management doctor.
We tried everything. I react badly to all the off-label psych meds. The only thing that works for me is the low dose of opioids I’ve been on for six years.
I lost my pain management doc because I went on Medicaid after I lost my corporate job due to my new disability, and while I was lucky enough to find a new PCP who took mercy on me and continued my low dose prescription, finding a new pain management doctor has been hell on earth.
One doctor decided to gaslight me and tell me it was illegal for him to prescribe me opioids if I took medical marijuana (the only thing I can tolerate, which has lowered my need for breakthrough meds). He lied directly to my face.
Another clinic refused to see me unless I consented to having a device implanted in my back to basically zap my spine into submission, never mind that requiring me to have surgery to get medication is really fucked up and also that device is contraindicated if you have a family history of seizures or an autoimmune disease, and I have both. They ignored me pointing out that part of the fact sheet and said “those are your choices.”
Another wanted me to go through all the meds I’d already tried all over again, just ignoring the 2 years I’d already spent testing them all, or the violent side effects I’d had, or how I almost crashed my car falling asleep behind the wheel, or stopped being able to carry on a conversation because I couldn’t follow it, or lost most of my memory and can’t now remember most of my daughter’s childhood. And they wanted me to stop taking the meds that DO work during this re-experiment. And yes, they had my entire chart.
Three others have simply refused to see me. “We don’t take patients who take opioids.” Three pain management doctors who won’t even see patients who take opioids.
An ER doctor called me a drug seeker to my face in 2015 because I was able to stay calm in extreme pain (because I live in constant pain), cancelled the ultrasound the PA had scheduled of my belly and threw me out of the ER. Six hours later I was back and vomiting violently, and two days after that they took out my gallbladder.
Earlier this year I had to coordinate my post-surgical pain relief with my PCP, because my surgeon was so afraid to prescribe painkillers that even though I was having two organs removed, she didn’t want to send me home with a proper prescription.
Later this year I’ve got to move across the country, and bluntly, I’m terrified. I’m terrified because without medical management of my pain, I literally cannot get out of bed. I am - not that this should be the fucking standard - the model patient. I’ve tried everything. I do exactly as required. And I’m terrified that I’ll be left to not function, to lie in bed in pain, unable to even put my feet on the ground, because despite being a model patient and literally having referrals from multiple doctors to that effect, I might as well be radioactive because of the medication I take.
And here’s the thing: I have multiple family members who take other Schedule II medications with just as high abuse potential and just as high street value and just as high overdose potential. How many of them are treated the way I’m treated?
Zero.
Zero of them are worried about being rejected by doctors. Zero of them are treated as massive risk factors despite six years of scrupulously following doctor’s orders and multiple doctors willing to vouch for them.
Doctors should be able and willing to manage pain. Period. If you’re so afraid to manage a patient’s pain that you can’t treat them, that you simply refuse them as a patient, then you’re in the wrong line of work. Because you know what else is on my record?
PTSD: medically triggered.
Why?
Because I was ignored for five days in the hospital in 2013 when I cried and said “something is wrong, I’m in too much pain, please make it stop.” Something was wrong, but no one wanted to manage my pain or figure out why I was still screaming in pain. Something was wrong, and it almost killed me. Twice.
Doctors were so afraid to take my pain seriously - multiple doctors, from multiple specialities, including three neurosurgeons - that they nearly killed me. Doctors were so afraid of treating my pain that they ignored the signs that something was wrong for five days. Five days of not sleeping, of begging someone to listen to me, of trying not to even breathe too deeply because it hurt so much.
They literally gave me PTSD because they were so afraid to deal with a patient in pain.
Get over your fears and deal with patients and their pain or go hang wallpaper. Even if the medical system were set up such that we could immediately see a specialist who would consent to properly treat us and not avoid us as patients from fear or distaste, and even if seeing a specialist was a guarantee of proper treatment, and it isn’t*, we need our primary care physicians to not be afraid to actually take care of us.
The human body is not designed to be in constant pain. It actively makes us sicker. It shortens our lifespans. It keeps us sedentary. It decreases our quality of life and keeps us separate from our families. And if all of those things aren’t a reason for a PCP to be involved with or to treat chronic pain, then we’re all doomed.
* In fact, it was a specialist treating me with disdain and ignoring me when I told him he was missing things that meant it took 3 years for that tumor to be found. Want to guess who actually listened to me and found that tumor within a week of me getting fed up with being told “you’d be in less pain if you lost weight” and going to her?
My primary care physician.
Good thing it was benign, hunh? I wonder what the survival rate is for tumors like that left malign in the nervous system.
🤷♂️
The opioid crisis was literally created by doctors refusing to treat patients in pain adequately. They cut people off from the medication they need so they resort to street methods. And when using the street methods, no one is monitoring their dosage or giving them the information they need to be safe and as a result, dependency turns into addiction. People think the opioids themself cause the problem, but it’s the medical system and industry who are at fault. If patients were treated properly from the start, the epidemic wouldn’t have ever happened.
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
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