Netvouz / docalex / tag / pain

Addiction, Pain and Public Health website

docalex — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 17:41:32 GMT

aka doctordeluca.com - site is a rich repository of full text academic, legal, journalistic and advocacy resources focusing on the federal attacks on pain doctors and pain patients, substance abuse, controlled drinking, harm reduction and psychopharmacology.

Chronic Pain in Veterans

docalex — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 02:26:45 GMT

Table of Contents: Introduction // Opiophobia and Opioignorance // Modern Understanding of Chronic Pain // Risk of Addiction in Opioid Therapy // Treatment and Outcomes // Undertreatment of Pain is a National Scourge // Footnotes

Dear VA - This is Pain 'Care'?

docalex — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 19:16:48 GMT

... A few months ago, a new group of what I call “Narco-Nazis” arrived at the VA, and forced all pain patients to sign a draconian pain contract on threat of losing all care. ...

Drug Law Blog

docalex — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 05:27:26 GMT

DeLuca on the Pain Doctor Crackdown; Alex Coolman; Drug War Blog; 2007-06-02.

Excerpt:

"This week Alex DeLuca had an interesting post on the nationwide criminal crackdown on pain doctors and in particular on the effects that this crackdown is having on patients who were previously under the care of these doctors. The bizarre thing, DeLuca notes, is that people who were once steady on pain management medication are instantly being reclassified as "addicts," with no distinction being made between dependence and addiction."

The post by me referred to is:

Utah and Federal Law Enforcement Collaborate Towards a Final Solution to the Prescription Drug Abuse Plague; Alex DeLuca; War on Doctors / Pain Crisis; 2007-05-3

Mangino to Represent Self in Nov. 28 Hearing

docalex — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 22:19:05 GMT

Several days ago Dr. William Mangino whose case the Pain Relief Network has been involved with, and that the War on Docs/Pain Crisis blog has followed in depth (see links below), sent me three documents, some fifteen pages in all, handwritten in block text, which I will call Mangino Petitioner's Motion including: 1. a two page letter to Judge Motto, 2. a six page Brief in Support of Petitioner's Motion, and, 3. a nine page Supplement to the Brief in Support All three handwritten documents available, as a single PDF. The Persecution of Dr. Willia

Medical Guidelines are not Prosecutorial Tools

docalex — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 05:07:26 GMT

"The WHO guidelines were never intended to be used as a prosecutorial tool. The invocation of the WHO “analgesic ladder” concept of progressive pharmacological treatment of pain, in state investigations of physicians, is sometimes unfair. On the one hand the guidelines are interpreted as rules and the physician is faulted for violating in some aspect. On the other hand, state rules and regulations are often at odds with the spirit and specifics of the WHO guidelines..."

Pain Patients Excluded from Senate Hearings

docalex — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 02:39:00 GMT

Siobhan Reynolds; President, Pain Relief Network; Submitted testimony to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs, “Gen Rx: Abuse of Prescription and OTC Drugs“; 2008-03-08 Conclusion: "It is unfortunate that Pain Relief Network was not invited to represent the patients at this hearing, and so the public will instead be treated to a kind of government fear show pushing this year’s moral panic, prescription drug abuse, that seeks merely to distract attention away from the government’s astonishingly brutal and thoughtless drug war campaigns, willfully ignoring direct harm to millions of innocent citizens, though their plight is in plain view."

Treatment of Pain and Substance Abuse

docalex — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 03:59:11 GMT

When specialists and academics and researchers come together to discuss common barriers to optimal pain management, they have found opioid therapy complicated, in both the pain medicine and addiction medicine fields, by misapprehensions and myths. Portenoy and Payne identified “Four types of phenomena that exemplify the accommodations that must be made to further [the goal of dissemination of accurate and up to date information to the fields].” 2 I will consider these briefly, excerpting from “Pain Specialists and Addiction Medicine Specialists Unite to Address Critical Issues.” 3

Utah / Feds Boldly Move Toward Solution to Addiction

docalex — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 01:04:11 GMT

Excerpt: So, what have we got? We have local officials running around preparing for a hypothetical law enforcement problem the policeman is hyping. Through some horrific leap of irrationality and probably criminal negligence, state and local officials have taken law enforcement’s worst case scenario - that the doctor was a drug dealer, all of his “patients” criminal addicts, all the meds all of them were ever prescribed were 100% diverted to high school students leading to generations of misery and crime for sure - and blotted out any notion that there might be a medically directed public health approach to consider. And no criminal charges [against Dr. William Stack] have even been filed yet.

War on Doctors / Pain Crisis

docalex — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 03:44:18 GMT

War on Doctors / Pain Crisis - the Blog of the Pain Relief Network (PRN), an organization of pain patients, pain docs, and pain relief advocates dedicated to the abolition of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) which imposes a defacto federal regulation of Medicine, a right constitutionally reserved to the states.