Dear Friends in CIP and CI,

This is not about a knee surgery, nor your one back surgery.

It's about the "right to know."

1. By the time you require surgery damage is usually
done that affects pain and nerve endings.
2. In many cases surgery can correct structure but
not fix the "pain."
3. Many surgeons will NOT WRITE A CLASS 2 med
even if you're post op and suffering.
4. For many to get through PT or post op instructions
the pain is HIGHER than it was PRE op and this is
barbaric.
5. OUTCOMES--RSD, other secondary pain syndromes
worse than the initial pain.

You can view the entire link below (thanks to Cynn from OCPM)
but the choices and the care you receive depend on what your
own choices are.

1. Healthcare in the U.S. is a marketable commodity.
2. Do you get surgery that may not kill your pain for you
have no other options?
3. What are your options, have you gotten more than one
opinion?
4. It cost no more to go to a top teaching hospital for
care than a private physician sometimes less.

It's about pain. Most posts I do are about the unfair and uneducated
issues in America today due to NON MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS but
law enforcement dictating what your physician can or cannot do.

It's also about those who abuse the medications needed for CIP. If
you have CI but not CIP likely you know someone who does. Very
few surgeons will tell you when you have unnatural pain outside the
scope of their surgery that the surgery may have left you with RSD.

You have some say in all this. You have a solution.

Together those in CIP, those who require surgeries, those who
require a "quality of life" have a voice. Medical technology has
provided you with more than one solution.

It is your choice.

Peace,
Karen


A Fight for Full Disclosure of the Possible Pain
By JANE E. BRODY
Exerpts

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/08/health/08Brod.html?pagewanted=2&oref=login

March 8, 2005

The dozens of letters, phone calls and e-mail messages I've received
since writing my recent columns on total knee replacement and pain
management reveal that I struck a chord.

And as Dr. Laura Lewis Mantell of New York wrote to me, "The use of
opioid analgesics (narcotics) need not be avoided out of concerns
that addiction will ensue, because the incidence of addiction arising
out of postoperative exposure to opioids is negligible."When faced
with the kind of pain I experienced, doctors must treat it properly
and not act like frightened children when it comes to prescribing
narcotics, by far the best drugs for dealing with severe pain.

A narcotic like OxyContin is not abused by pain patients but by drug
addicts. I feel no euphoria, just pain relief, and I'm having no
problem weaning myself off it now that I am in much less pain.

The American Academy of Pain Medicine, the primary organization for
physicians who treat pain, is alarmed by the interim policy statement
issued by the United States Drug Enforcement Agency, which threatens
to make it even more difficult than it now is for legitimate
physicians to prescribe adequate pain relief for their patients.

Undertreatment of pain is already a public health crisis and the
government should act to improve the situation, not make it worse.

Undertreated pain destroys lives. As one young woman put it in an e-
mail message: "The effect of pain had an insidious effect on my life,
my outlook, my well-being and my relationships in every sphere of my
life. Pain is a funny thing. Unless you're the one feeling it, it's
basically meaningless."

The time is long overdue to instill empathy, not fear of persecution,
into the nation's physicians.

______________________________________


Write the NYT & J. Brody
letters@...












Karen Hallenbeck~Sikorsky~George BS,RN,UM,QC
Owner-Moderator
"AnGeLsInPain"
"OneVoiceInPain"

http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/AnGeLsInPain

Interqual Certified
Published Psychiatric Researcher
Advocate for those in CIP, HIV, Psychologic Pain
"A Higher Power is necessary to find the ability to withstand self
destruction.."


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]