Letter from patients
Not all the patients agree….
December 20, 2019- letter from chronic pain patient
So I read this article and your studies. I am a real estate broker now (or I was till this ridiculous crap comes out about yoga healing my now unworkable pain and anxiety) but in the past I was in research, qa, medical devices and statistics. I studied engineering physics and environmental biology. Masters in statistics with specialty in health care.
I will give you a little benefit, but I also want you to know that you and others with your political BS are killing thousands of chronic pain patients and making hundreds of thousands suffer.
I had a major knee injury with extensive nerve damage in 2005. I am resistant to anesthesia, woke up in shock from one surgery and might have woken up in the OR and spent 3 years just trying for them to get the proper anesthesia for surgeries which they finally got right on my final one.
I had terrible pain management for another 2 years until a doctor got me on a program of oxycontin 3x/day. For the last several years until 2 years ago I varied my dose around 20-30 mg total for years. Meaning, I was on 20mg 3x/day or 30 and then back to 20. I had a functional life.
I had functioned as good as anyone can who has chronic nerve damage, but ridiculous garbage like conducting surgeries on patients that are fake is horrifying as is the complete nonsense about opioids not working for chronic pain in certain people. My dose of oxycontin, the only drug that did not cause horrific side effects, wellbutrin and occasional xanax…(about 20-30 pills per year) allowed me to run my own business, make money and be a decent human being. I even ran for political office.
Now because of nonsense like oh this is all in patients heads and yoga therapy will fix it, along with the CDC and the DEA taking away working drugs from functional people, to protect us from overdose…Gee I have 14 years of no overdose, but heroin users are killing themselves…..
I now have no quality of life. I have been rapidly tapered by my pain physician because they are scared to death of the DEA and they all use studies like this crap to say opioids don’t work for long term chronic nerve pain. BS. My doctors thru the years all said that they did. One doctor retired from treating patients. I was functioning proof. along with I am sure hundreds of thousands of others that long term opioids can/do work at least better than nothing. They saved my life. You don’t take diabetics off working drugs because they have a medical condition and drugs were working for me but now I cannot get any anti anxiety meds and am being forced to rapidly taper so I am in horrific pain. My normal BP went from 110/80 to 189/1something thanks to oh its all in peoples heads and these drugs have no benefit long terrm. Sickening what your cohort are doing to people already in pain and suffering.
I say to you…put your knee in a vise, crank it down until you cannot tolerate it and pray for death, then tell me how yoga works for chronic pain. Now do the same for your child or someone you actually care about. Why are you instead not looking into the long term proper effects of opioid therapy on the success stories? Because there are I am guessing hundreds of thousands of people out there with those, that are now killing themselves or wishing for death. All based on garbage of one study of 30 people.
There are 3 drugs that helped with my pain. I had the best pain protocol doctors try everything. My friend who was a Northwestern educated pharmacist with 2 masters in pain treatment and specialized in NICU cases said Northwestern has become insane with this political nonsense and cannot believe the damage you are doing to people. You should know that for some people opioids work wonders and forcing those people to suffer because drug users are getting high off illegal narcotics will only kill decent people instead of drug abusers.
Have you looked at all the comments on most of these articles that come out and say that one study that says anti inflammatory are just as good as opioids at treating chronic pain. There are thousands of comments of peoples lives destroyed by that one study, that turns out is only one type of pain and a shoddy study too.
I had a functional life after a horrific injury. Now I am suffering horrible pain because my effective treatment has been removed. I did all the integrated pain management. I was zonked out of my mind with as many as 17 different drugs in a short period. Pain doctors are going out of business because of your studies and patients are killing themselves or dying from trying to do something. You have to know that some peoples nerves keep firing and no amount of CBT is gonna fix that. Horrific the pain I am in now and I am sure others.
I know I am wasting my time, but laid up in bed, unable to function anymore thanks to the “crackdown”. I could forward you hundreds of articles that the comments say the same things. Why do opioids work? You know why.
Years ago when this first started the doctors destroyed my liver thanks to studies at the time saying that you can’t give regular oxycontin or the other opioid out without anti imflammatories because that will keep drug users from abusing the drugs, so doctors gave me way too much acetaminophen and it took years of treatments to heal that damage that of course now is found to be garbage. I am sure when enough pain patients eventually die from this crackdown things will focus on how to fix this problem for real, but until then, I have no doubt you are killing people, not helping them.
BTW I am no drug addict, I hate the fact I have to take anything or be around doctors at all, as most of them just want to make money off patients. In 10 years never failed a drug test or pill count (though I hate being treated like a child for my medical condition that is not even my fault). Now that this nonsense has come to the chronic patients, they don’t even want to treat us. Trigger injections (which don’t work but make what 5K per treatment for the doc) or we drop you or force ween you.
I know I am wasting my time with you and your cohort, but you have never had pain right? And if you did and nothing else worked and you knew via proof that oxycontin or dilaudid worked and you could have a life, you would scrap that and take yoga and nutrition? Isn’t the rule first do no harm?
just thought you should know….you are killing people.
Thank You,
Anonymous patient.