The problem of pain

Even worse, I've had patients I trusted turn out to be junkies in need of a fix. An earnest, well-dressed young man once came to my office complaining of a common chronic condition that, he said, had not been relieved by high doses of over-the-counter painkillers. He convinced me to to prescribe him narcotic pills, and didn't bat an eye when I asked him to sign a pain contract that required him to return every month for refills and only receive prescriptions from me in person. For the better part of a year, he never missed an appointment, and seemed genuinely receptive to unrelated preventive care that I recommended based on his age and risk factors. His deceit was exposed only after he stumbled, intoxicated, into an acute care facility staffed by a doctor who knew me and requested an early refill of a prescription for a different brand of painkillers prescribed by a third doctor for another imaginary condition. My colleague told him the gig was up, and I've never seen him again.

I believe that drug addiction is a disease. So why do I find this patient's lies (and those from others like him) so hard to forgive? Because they have consequences for people who are truly in pain. For patients' convenience, I transmit virtually all prescriptions electronically to the pharmacy, but I'm not allowed to do this with "controlled substances" such as painkillers. Wary of encouraging drug abuse, some insurers impose arbitrary limits on the number of pills a patient may be prescribed in one month, which I can only override by spending hours on the phone or not at all. One chain pharmacy recently started demanding signed copies of chart notes that included the pain-causing diagnosis before they would dispense painkillers (a practice that I believe to be an illegal invasion of privacy, but they didn't budge an inch when I told them so). And worst of all, doctors like me who have been burned before are that much more likely to view our patients with suspicion.

In the July issue of Health Affairs, Janice Schuster described a health odyssey that began with a seemingly minor surgical procedure and ended with her becoming "one of the estimated 100 million American adults who live with chronic pain" - in this case neuropathic pain, or pain from nerve damage that in my experience can be the most difficult type to treat. She wrote about how health system restrictions designed to discourage abuse created obstacles to her obtaining adequate pain relief, and about a lack of compassion from her primary care physician (who "dismissed my symptoms") and her surgeon (who "said again and again that he had not heard of a patient experiencing such pain"). As the author of a popular self-help book for persons facing serious illness, Schuster understood better than most the public health crisis posed by prescription painkillers, but that understanding offered little consolation as she navigated "the maze of pain management" that has evolved to deal with it:

Pain patients like me often feel trapped between the clinical need to treat and manage pain and the social imperative to restrict access to such drugs and promote public safety. ... When I am not overwhelmed by pain, or depressed by it, I am furious at the attitudes I encounter, especially among physicians and pharmacists. It has been stigmatizing and humiliating. ... Surely, we can find better ways to ease the suffering and devise treatments and strategies that do more good than harm and that do not shame and stigmatize those who suffer.

A few of my colleagues have become so disillusioned with the dilemmas of pain management that they have sworn off prescribing narcotic painkillers entirely. As often as I've been tempted to take that path, I won't abandon patients in pain, for whom the services of caring and competent family physicians are needed now more than ever.

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