Monthly Archives: January 2019

Complications of Uncontrolled, Persistent Pain – By Forest Tennant, MD, DrPH – Jan 2018

To the unfortunate patient who is afflicted and the practitioner who treats it, incurable, persistent pain is truly its own disease regardless of its underlying cause.

Persistent pain, which is also often characterized as chronic or intractable, has all the ramifications of a disease in that it may have pre-clinical and overt phases.

I like that he calls it “persistent pain” instead of “chronic pain”, a term which has become synonymous in the public’s eye as a whining, complaining, catastrophizing, gonna-be addict.   

Draft Report on Pain Management Best Practices | HHS.gov – Dec 2018

This document is so long and so detailed that I spent hours working it over to add my own voluminous commentary.

I posted the second, most significant part yesterday, HHS Report on Pain Mgmt Best Practices – part 2, and the first part the day before: HHS Report on Pain Mgmt Best Practices – part 1.  

This is the third and final part of my series, and covers the middle of the document, starting where I left off in the second part detailing interventional procedures.

This seems like the first good news in a while: a government agency admitting that most opioid overdoses are from illicit fentanyl. The report also documents the downsides of non-opioid medications and highlights the predicament of pain patients.

Draft Report on Pain Management Best Practices | HHS.gov

This document is so long and detailed that I spent hours picking it over to find the critical pieces and add my own commentary. It’s far from perfect, but still a welcome change from the usual PROPaganda – and I choose to celebrate.

Here’s the first part:  

Draft Report on Pain Management Best Practices | HHS.gov – Dec 2018

This document is so long and so detailed that I spent hours working it over to add my own voluminous commentary. I posted the first part yesterday: HHS Report on Pain Mgmt Best Practices – part 1.

Below is the second part, covering more about opioid medication with all its “risk” and then the final, most significant section, covering the problems and errors of the CDC Opioid Prescribing Guidelines:

2.2.1 Risk Assessment 

The civil war over prescription opioids – by Lynn Webster, MD – Dec 2018

The war is between science and fact versus PROPaganda and media hype.

Over the past 10 to 15 years, attitudes towards opioid use for pain have shifted dramatically. In the 1990s and early 2000s, pain relief was front and center on the newsstands and in medical literature.

During that time, compassion for people in pain increased and permeated our culture and opioids became standard therapy for chronic pain, because few affordable and effective treatment alternatives existed.