April Fools Day – A National Day of Pain – National Pain Report –by Richard A. (“Red”) Lawhern, Ph.D – Mar 2019
I wish this effort had started sooner – maybe next year.
.April Fools Day is known around the world as a day for practical and sometimes impractical jokes.
This year, chronic pain patients, their families and their doctors can instead choose to make April 1st a day of change and protest. It can become a National Day of Pain.
The needle on public policy for treatment of pain is beginning to quiver:
- Stories of people denied pain treatment or deserted by their doctors are appearing more often in popular media.
- Draft recommendations to Congress from the US Department of Health and Human Services Task Force on Pain Management call for a serious and patient-centered change of direction.
- The American Medical Association has repudiated the 2016 Centers for Disease Control guidelines on prescription of opioids.
- Over 300 medical professionals have published a thoughtful demand that CDC rewrite the guidelines to correct horrendous outcomes in over-regulation and patient suicides.
- In March, the House HELP Committee heard testimony that the guidelines need to be taken totally out of the CDC and done over by NIH or the National Academies of Medicine.
So now is the time for patients to add their voices and finally be heard.
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