It’s amazing how hard some things hit you. I saw the title of a BMC Medicine article titled “Access to pain treatment as a human right,” and I started to cry. Actually reading the abstract brought up a complex mixture of emotions that included anger, sorrow and frustration.
The article is from the organization Human Rights Watch, which, according to its own mission statement “is dedicated to protecting the human rights of people around the world. . . . We challenge governments and those who hold power to end abusive practices and respect international human rights law.”
In a nutshell, it talks about the nearly 50-year-old human rights law governments around the world adopted in order to work toward universal access to narcotic pain treatments. Today, Human Rights Watch finds governments have fallen down on the job.
The abstract says:
“Significant barriers to effective pain treatment include: the failure of many governments to put in place functioning drug supply systems; the failure to enact policies on pain treatment and palliative care; poor training of healthcare workers; the existence of unnecessarily restrictive drug control regulations and practices; fear among healthcare workers of legal sanctions for legitimate medical practice; and the inflated cost of pain treatment. These barriers can be understood not only as a failure to provide essential medicines and relieve suffering but also as human rights abuses.”
In the U.S., we do have a functioning drug supply system, but in my opinion we’re failing on the rest of it.
- Policies are set by medical institutions or individual doctors and vary drastically.
- Our healthcare workers aren’t well trained at recognizing addictive behaviors and their perception of abuse risk by pain patients is far higher than the actual risk, according to multiple studies.
- Our drug control regulations and practices, again, vary widely; some are far too stringent and some are so lax as to allow for abuse.
- Our doctors are scared to prescribe pain meds because they’ve seen colleagues face criminal charges and loss of license.
- And I don’t think I need to tell anyone with a chronic illness about the cost of health care.
Leaving millions of us to suffer with pain from fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome and a host of other undertreated, painful conditions is a violation of the doctor’s oath to do no harm and a violation of international human rights law. Wouldn’t it be nice if we started to see some enforcement?
Someone commented here once that we consider it compassionate to put animals to sleep when they’re in pain, but we’ll let human beings suffer indefinitely. I hope Human Rights Watch will push for the humane treatment of people with chronic pain, and I hope at least some governments will do something about it.
I’m fortunate — I have doctors who prescribe pain medications for my pain (novel concept!), even though I’m in a state with especially restrictive regulations. However, I’m always afraid my luck will run out with the next refill request, and it scares the heck out of me. When I think of all the people who are in pain like me and can’t even get the occasional Vicodin, I can’t help but cry.
I’m planning to forward the Human Rights Watch article to my elected representatives. If you’d like to do the same, here it is:
The right to pain treatment — that’s one I’ll fight for.
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Pain Treatment as a Human Right originally appeared on About.com Fibromyalgia & Chronic Fatigue Syndrome on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 06:00:28.
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