New DEA "guide lines" making our lives unbearable, it must stop!!!
If you are a chronic pain management patient, you undoubtedly are aware of the new DEA treatment guidelines for opiate dosages. These "guidelines" are supposed to be just that, guidelines. However, these guidelines are nothing more than a blanket statement to doctors, that all patients have their medication reduced drastically to the same amount. How could it be possible that every patient could need the exact same treatment? It's not !!! The idea originally was to stop primary care docs from treating chronic pain and having their patients referred to pain management specialists for proper ongoing treatment of chronic pain. This has morphed into a huge political issue due to the heroin epidemic which is out of control . The idea that all of these Heroin addicts were people that were being treated with opiates by pain management specialists and decided that they wanted to get high with something stronger is absurd! Chronic pain sufferers are people that are looking for relief, not looking for a way to get high !!! We are patients, not street addicts and should be treated as such. The government has now taken these guidelines to a whole new level. Pain management specialists are abandoning their patients because the government is threatening them with losing their licenses , their insurance or even jail in some cases. Patients that have taken years to get on the right combination of medications to allow them to cope with painful illnesses are being cut off and told "I'm sorry but I have no choice" by their doctors. It seems that Jeff Sessions recently appropriated funds for the DEA to spend their time visiting doctors offices to make sure that they are "complying" with the guidelines. Wouldn't our dollars be better spent on stopping the flow of Heroin and now deadly Fentanyl into our country instead of getting in between our doctors and ourselves. Who are these government employees that think that they know how to treat chronic pain better than the professionals do, who have trained for years to custom tailor a treatment plan for each unique patient. One day recently, I walked into my doctors office who has treated me very well for many years and I found his waiting room filled with patients crying with tears streaming down their cheeks. Then when it was my turn to see the doctor, it was quite clear to me what caused all of the tears. We were all being told that our medications were being cut down to next to nothing. A young man in a wheel chair with MS and had broken his back in a work related accident was hysterical and at the same time there was an older gentleman that was in obvious severe pain and being carried into the office because he could not really walk on his own anymore. Myself, I pass kidney stones each and every day of my life. Many ER nurses have said that they would rather give birth a hundred times with no drugs than to pass another kidney stone. The pain is excruciating to say the least. I have been able to function and have a semi-normal life because of the pain meds I am prescribed. Now, I'm told that i must be weaned off of them because the DEA stopped into my doctors office and after meeting with his lawyer he is weaning all of his patients down to this ridiculous arbitrary number of milligrams that the DEA guidelines demand. I am just one of hundreds of thousands of people facing this horror. I am asking our Congress and everyone else involved in this within our government to act quickly to put a stop to this insanity!!! I am begging you to put yourselves in our shoes and think how you would feel if you were being cutoff from the one thing that keeps you from being in constant agony and allows you to function at work and with your family. People all over the internet are talking of ending their lives because they cannot face a life of constant horrible pain. We are not criminals !!!! We are sick people that need our medication and nobody should be telling our doctors how to treat us !!! I am asking you, President Trump and the rest of our representatives to fix this and do it fast as we suffer every minute of every day that passes.
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