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The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons says this to its members: “If you’re thinking about getting into pain management using opioids as appropriate: DON’T. Forget what you learned in medical school – drug agents [from the DEA] now set medical standards.”
Legal talent to share
Most people would not use the word “gift” to describe a diagnosis of not one but two chronic, debilitating diseases.
Laura Cooper is not most people.
The Eugene lawyer has embraced as opportunities her multiple sclerosis and a condition that causes painful spinal tumors. With her living expenses now covered by disability payments and an annuity from her days as a private finance attorney, she is free to practice an area of law she is passionate about: advocating for the rights of patients in pain.
Cooper cares so deeply about the issue that, last year alone, she donated more than 1,200 hours in legal services to the cause, earning her a top pro bono award from the Oregon State Bar.
Often working literally from her sickbed, she has helped prepare a class action lawsuit now before the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Filed on behalf of Spokane physician Dr. Merle Janes and 27 Eastern Washington pain patients, the case challenges that state’s “Opiod Dosing Guidelines.” The suit alleges that Washington’s efforts to enforce the guidelines have prevented Janes from providing — and patients from receiving — adequate pain treatment.
The premise of the suit: Patients needing medical pain management with opioid drugs must be accommodated under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Opiods are a class of opium-based and synthetic drugs prescribed by a physician for medical purposes.
“It’s been a godsend,” Cooper said of her forced early retirement from paid legal practice. “My disability allows me to do the kind of work everybody would do if they could. I can work on things that matter in my heart.”
Tanya Treadway’s Unconstitutional Vendetta
This week the Institute for Justice and the Reason Foundation (which publishes Reason magazine and Reason Online) filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of Siobhan Reynolds, the pain treatment activist who is fighting a federal prosecutor’s vindictive obstruction-of-justice investigation. As I explained in a September column, Reynolds, president of the Pain Relief Network (PRN), ran afoul of Assistant U.S. Attorney Tanya Treadway by publicly defending Haysville, Kansas, physician Stephen Schneider, whom Treadway is prosecuting on drug charges related to his painkiller prescriptions. After unsuccessfully seeking a gag order to prevent Reynolds from talking about the case, Treadway tried a different tack. She obtained grand jury subpoenas that demanded a wide range of material detailing PRN’s efforts on behalf of Schneider and other doctors Reynolds believes have been wrongly accused of running “pill mills.”
Treating the Pain Epidemic
Chronic pain affects more than 70 million Americans, which makes it more widespread than heart disease, cancer and diabetes combined. It costs the economy more than $100 billion per year. So why don’t more doctors and researchers take it seriously?
That is the challenge raised by a new report from the Mayday Fund, a nonprofit group that studies pain treatment. The report, which been endorsed by an array of medical groups, advocates a revolution in the training of doctors, the financing of research and the education of law-enforcement officials.
“The fact is that people aren’t getting competent and cost-effective treatment for chronic pain,” said Dr. Russell Portenoy, one of the co-chairmen of the panel that prepared the report.
Dr. Portenoy, the chairman of the department of pain medicine and palliative care at Beth Israel Medical Center, was one of the pain experts who supported William Hurwitz, the Virginia doctor who was imprisoned for prescribing opioid painkillers to patients who resold them. (Dr. Hurwitz’s sentence was reduced after a retrial in which Dr. Portenoy and other experts testified on his behalf.)
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