How zealous persecution of pain physicians is affecting patients with legitimate pain, and how many other doctors are being gun-shy when it comes to treating pain:
Meanwhile, Dr. Schneider and his wife remain jailed without bond at the request of federal prosecutors pending a first court date later this month. His patients are now scrambling to find replacement doctors with little success, especially now that other local doctors see what could await them if they apply aggressive opioid pain management treatments.
(via THCB)
Related posts:
- Chronic pain and the troops
- Chronic pain and drug pushing
- How the courts are harming pain management
- Patient satisfaction vs pain relief
- Opioids and back pain
- Pot smoker breaks pain contract, sues doctor
- The PHR wars
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{ 5 comments }
This is disgusting. Restricting medicine, and any secondary market for drug abusers, should not take priority over the adequate treatment of pain. It’s immoral to make keeping someone from “fun” more important than alleviation of suffering.
There would be no stinking secondary market but for the mistake of making physicians gatekeepers to pain medicine. Physicians should be in the role of recommending appropriate treatment, not the role of making sure the undeserving are denied treatment.
The usual “Justice Department” DEA witch-hunt/hatchet job. Held without bail, facing CENTURIES of jail time, Dr. Stephen Schneider’s career and all his assets have been destroyed. His wife is similarly incarcerated. Are there any children?
I have begun seeing a few chronic pain patients. However, I have made a decision after reading yet another DEA horror story to terminate these patients. Sorry, but I cannot have the DEA Gestapo breaking down my door.
“It’s immoral to make keeping someone from “fun” more important than alleviation of suffering.”
I guess the problem I have isn’t with the “fun”. It’s with the dead people. As a county coroner I investigated and signed at least a dozen accidental overdoses with prescription meds, either obtained legally from the doctor or illegally, in my years in office. Small rural county. I know this is a big problem…
So, “Pill Mills” just increase this likelihood. It is every doctors obligation to treat patients, their pain and suffering. But I see so many doctors shrug about the “do no harm” part of the oath…I believe an overdose is harm…
Those guys who run pill mills are disgusting and should be shut down by lisensure boards.
On the other hand, with the war on drugs, I was asked to give up my civil liberties to stop other people from doing stupid to themselves.
Now I am asked to make my doctor a policeman and give up the privacy and sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship–and make me feel like a criminal or deviant if I ask for pain relief–just to stop stupid people from doing stupid to themselves.
I have had enough of it. Stop the war on drugs. Let the idiots have at it and leave me free to live my life. Sure, people overdose and kill themselves. But you know, they had a better death than I will ever have, and we know what to do about it–bury them.
Everybody has to die and we all get a death certificate eventually Dr. Coroner–but we don’t have to live as unfree men with a medical gestapo looking over our shoulder.
I makes me sicken to see people out there and I’m one of them to have to go with out pain med.s because some people don’t use them right,my god!!! taking pain med.s from people who truly need them is not going to keep the next junky from getting drugs off the streets and killing thier selves,there is lots of med.s that people over dose on every day and they don’t keep those med.s from any one! do they? I have been on pain med.s now now for 3years and now that I had to move I have these doctors pushing me around and putting me through with-draw with out any help and I have a lot of medical problems that by going through with draw can kill me!I have been left to lay in bed at the age of 37 and can not move,and left to go through with-draw with no help,They treat junkys off the streets better then me and help them get off street drugs and I was put on them by a doctor and will now go through hell! so I’m looking for an attorny!!! My life has stop and I cry myself to sleep just to be woke up in more pain,My family crys with me and are as mad as I am to be treated the way I am by doctors, I’m sick and tired of it and I’m taking my life back!!!
From hurting in Maryland
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