“You never know what you have until it’s gone.”
When your doctor tells you “I can’t treat your pain because I can lose my license if I do”, who is being served here? The patient? The doctor?
Who?
Living with chronic pain not only disrupts your day to day routine, your work, your family, and your overall physical health, it also erodes your sense of hope that things will get better. It is a major source of depression.
Getting the medication you need to control and deal with pain can be not only life changing, but life saving.
So why are all pain patients lumped into this category of “drug seeker” or “addict”? Because there is no nuance or attention to detail in today’s discussions about pain medicine, pain treatment, and pain management in the political and mass media spectrum.
Only one message is sent to all of us: pain medication causes addiction. Period.
It’s simply not true.
So why do everyday people need to suffer for no reason? Because of a narrative that keeps getting repeated without all of the data necessary to show that there is much more going on here than addiction only.
It’s crazy to think that in this day and age anyone would need a “Patient Advocate”, but the reality is so many people do, and that’s where Claudia Merandi steps in.
