Archive for October, 2007
DEA: a Psychological Terror Group; Siobhan Reynolds; War on Doctors/Pain Crisis blog of the Pain Relief Network; 2007-10-20. Regarding this Blog Entry: This essay, excerpted below, by Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) blogger James Anthony focuses on raids against state licensed medical marijuana cooperatives, but could just as easily be about raids on medical offices of state licensed physicians who issue legal prescriptions for pain medications to people in pain. said about our doctor busts. The Pain Relief Network sincerely appreciate the input from this law enforcement officer from LEAP and hope this is the end of all the blaming the victim that has been going on. When courageous and enlightened law enforcement agents themselves speak the truth about aggressive federal police actions targeting innocent patients, physicians, and advocates, it makes for powerful testimony. PRN encourages LEAP members to investigate and write more about the DEA’s reign of terror against people in pain and the doctors who try and relieve their suffering. Patients and advocates often ask if there’s any pattern to DEA raids. This a common and understandable question–as human beings we want a predictable and sensible universe. And this natural impulse to seek patterns is exploited by all psychological terror groups in a number of ways. I include the DEA as a psychological terror group because,
There are two basic ways to exploit this human desire for patterns:
[DEA] truly believes [they are at] war and we are the enemy. They are not interested in debating this issue or in allowing different states to try different approaches. To the DEA, we are evil and must be eradicated – or intimidated into surrender. Given all that, the DEA does three things:
So we have the following patterns:
So when you need to bump up your stats (or you need to justify that useless multi-agency task force’s multi-million dollar budget that ain’t done jack all year), whip up a “year-long investigation” … and put on the flak jacket, round up the SWAT team and go kick some ass. Oh yeah, and extra bonus points if you can bust a person of color, or a youth, or someone with a record, or someone who’s doing it right and actually balancing the books, generating a surplus and paying all their taxes – then you can use their financial statements against them… I’m really sorry that I can’t give you the “rules,” so we never have to worry about being busted. The DEA is not rules-based. It is our enemy – distribute cannabis, and you are fair game for capture, torture, imprisonment, kidnapping, and loss of all property (the only thing left is attainder of blood – where they curse your entire family name for all time to come, but give them a minute to work it out). Of course you can sweeten the odds: have your city government and neighbors love you, be white, sit in a wheelchair, change your last name to Bush, be extremely lucky, turn around three times counter-clockwise every morning and say the Hail Mary backwards… Here’s my advice, which I give to every potential client at the first meeting: Don’t do it (for all the reasons given above and more). And I totally understand that most of them walk away. That’s a good thing. If they go for it anyway, I call that committed. And that’s a good thing too. But just be real. And be smart. Anyone who operates a dispensary has an extremely high risk-comfort level, or you could say, is either a hero or a fool. [END] As always, we ask that you help PRN fight to protect the rights of patients and the doctors who treat them. Thank you for clicking the link below.
www.painreliefnetwork.org Originally Syndicated via RSS from War on Doctors / Pain Crisis
Distortion of Pain Medicine; adapted from a post to the Chronic Pain forum of Spine-Health.com about the “Out of Pain Medicine” topic. Alexander DeLuca, M.D.; War on Doctors/Pain Crisis blog of the Pain Relief Network; 2007-10-19. I have been participating a little on the chronic pain forums of Spine-Health.com recently. Patients present their cases and their lives and their current problems and try to help guide each other through a baffling array of barriers to care. What is so frustrating in these stories patient after patient relates in these forums, stories I have sadly become very accustomed to hearing in my work as a pain advocate for the Pain Relief Network, is a core medical irrationality, a double bind, a lie really. I’ll try to explain what I mean. The doctors prescribe very low dose regimens to begin with. Which might be okay if they saw the patient every few days and aggressively titrated up the dose and changed to more potent medications at the right time such that the patient was titrated to analgesic effect which is the medical standard of care for the treatment of chronic pain. (I think it is important for pain patients to really understand what these phrases mean, and to thoroughly grasp the modern, medical understanding of chronic pain –> see: the Recommended Reading section at end of this post). BUT TITRATION TO EFFECT IS ALMOST NEVER DONE. At the same time, opioid contracts, usually offensive documents directed at detecting diversion of medication, are required of patients even before a real doctor-patient relationship, which would be based on mutual trust, could develop. In testimonial after testimonial it seems obvious to me that the doctors and clinics are in fact placing the need to catch bad patients ABOVE the professional ethical obligation to hold the best interests of the individual patient before them above all others. Pain relief is in the best interest of the pain patient. This seems obvious on its face in a society that considers itself civilized. Beyond that, relief of suffering, where that can be accomplished, is a core medical obligation. Yet pain relief seems almost an afterthought to these doctors and clinics, and even when they actually try to provide a trial of chronic opioid therapy when this is obviously indicated, they do so clumsily and badly and with loathing. An appropriate titration is almost never accomplished and so the outcomes tend to be terrible with the vast majority of chronic pain patients remaining in needless ongoing pain even when they are lucky enough to get started on opioids. And that unrelieved pain will cause the disease of chronic pain to progress in many cases, leading to the medically bizarre current state of affairs in which doctors supposedly involved in a doctor-patient relationship to relieve pain, watch their patients deteriorate over years, all for the want of a few hundred milligrams of morphine equivalent. Understand how grotesquely the ethical norms and best practices of medicine have been distorted in pain management, as physicians labor to serve drug war imperatives. Imagine if Type I (”insulin-dependent”) diabetics were routinely prescribed oral hypoglycemic agents instead of the injected insulin the physicians actually knew was indicated (the medical standard of care). And even as their patients go into diabetic ketoacidosis, most respectable diabetes doctors (the community standard) would only grudgingly prescribe insulin, and then in doses that improved blood sugar only the slighted amount, and not enough to prevent the inexorable progression of the disease. Insane, huh? Yup, but that is how mainstream “pain management” is mostly practiced these days. An academic article on medical ethics: What chronic pain is: Standards of Care: Aberrant Drug-Related Behaviors aka Red Flags: [END] As always, we ask that you help PRN fight to protect the rights of patients and the doctors who treat them. Thank you for clicking the link below.
www.painreliefnetwork.org Originally Syndicated via RSS from War on Doctors / Pain Crisis
The Good Germans Among Us; Frank Fisher, M.D.; War on Doctors/Pain Crisis blog of the Pain Relief Network; 2007-09-18. Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics - F. Rich, NYTimes Friends, The NYT article below represents a massive step forward. It is now apparent that Americans countenance torture carried out by our government. Soon, we may discover that this policy isn’t restricted to terrorists, and that in fact our physicians are doing it to all of us. Last night I sat in a hospital room with a friend who was in so much pain that she hadn’t had any sleep for 48 hours. When she began to hallucinate from sleep deprivation, her nurse used this as a pretense to deny her a minuscule increase in dosage of pain medicine that her physician had ordered 2 hours earlier. The poor bastard was too freaked out to even think rationally about actually controlling her pain. – Frank Bush Lies Doesn’t Cut It Anymore. By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto Gonzales, we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever since photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago. As Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The Sunday Times of London, America’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques have a grotesque provenance: “Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the ‘third degree.’ It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.” … As Mrs. Bush spoke, two women, both Armenian Christians, were gunned down in Baghdad by contractors underwritten by American taxpayers. On this matter, the White House has been silent. That incident followed the Sept. 16 massacre in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, where 17 Iraqis were killed by security forces from Blackwater USA, which had already been implicated in nearly 200 other shooting incidents since 2005. There has been no accountability. The State Department, Blackwater’s sugar daddy for most of its billion dollars in contracts, won’t even share its investigative findings with the United States military and the Iraqi government, both of which have deemed the killings criminal. The gunmen who mowed down the two Christian women worked for a Dubai-based company managed by Australians, registered in Singapore and enlisted as a subcontractor by an American contractor headquartered in North Carolina. This is a plot out of “Syriana” by way of “Chinatown.” There will be no trial. We will never find out what happened. A new bill passed by the House to regulate contractor behavior will have little effect, even if it becomes law in its current form. We can continue to blame the Bush administration for the horrors of Iraq — and should. Paul Bremer, our post-invasion viceroy and the recipient of a Presidential Medal of Freedom for his efforts, issued the order that allows contractors to elude Iraqi law, a folly second only to his disbanding of the Iraqi Army. But we must also examine our own responsibility for the hideous acts committed in our name in a war where we have now fought longer than we did in the one that put Verschärfte Vernehmung on the map. … As the war has dragged on, it is hard to give Americans en masse a pass. We are too slow to notice, let alone protest, the calamities that have followed the original sin. In April 2004, Stars and Stripes first reported that our troops were using makeshift vehicle armor fashioned out of sandbags, yet when a soldier complained to Donald Rumsfeld at a town meeting in Kuwait eight months later, he was successfully pilloried by the right. Proper armor procurement lagged for months more to come. Not until early this year, four years after the war’s first casualties, did a Washington Post investigation finally focus the country’s attention on the shoddy treatment of veterans, many of them victims of inadequate armor, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and other military hospitals. … It was always the White House’s plan to coax us into a blissful ignorance about the war. Part of this was achieved with the usual Bush-Cheney secretiveness, from the torture memos to the prohibition of photos of military coffins. But the administration also invited our passive complicity by requiring no shared sacrifice. A country that knows there’s no such thing as a free lunch was all too easily persuaded there could be a free war. Instead of taxing us for Iraq, the White House bought us off with tax cuts. Instead of mobilizing the needed troops, it kept a draft off the table by quietly purchasing its auxiliary army of contractors to finesse the overstretched military’s holes. With the war’s entire weight falling on a small voluntary force, amounting to less than 1 percent of the population, the rest of us were free to look the other way at whatever went down in Iraq. We ignored the contractor scandal to our own peril… Last week Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq war combat veteran who directs Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, sketched for me the apocalypse to come. Should Baghdad implode, our contractors, not having to answer to the military chain of command, can simply “drop their guns and go home.” Vulnerable American troops could be deserted by those “who deliver their bullets and beans.” … Our moral trajectory over the Bush years could not be better dramatized than it was by a reunion of an elite group of two dozen World War II veterans in Washington this month. They were participants in a top-secret operation to interrogate some 4,000 Nazi prisoners of war. Until now, they have kept silent, but America’s recent record prompted them to talk to The Washington Post. “We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an M.I.T. physicist whose interrogation of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, took place over a chessboard. George Frenkel, 87, recalled that he “never laid hands on anyone” in his many interrogations, adding, “I’m proud to say I never compromised my humanity.” Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those “good Germans” who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country’s good name. [END] Originally Syndicated via RSS from War on Doctors / Pain Crisis |
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