By Staff.
Today, Fox News ran their third article in a “three-part series on the nation’s struggle to address its crippling opioid crisis, and the unintended victims left in its wake.”Health Experts Offer Solutions For Unintended Victims of Opioid Crackdown
In case you missed it you can find part 1 here and part 2 here.,
In part 3, the focus was on understanding the cause-and-effect relationship between the “opioid crisis” and CDC guidelines for prescribing opioid medication, and the healthcare providers and their patients.
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Finally, the importance of balance is becoming apparent, with Fox News reporting, “Striking the right balance between getting control of the overdose epidemic and protecting access to treatment that brings relief to pain sufferers is a public health imperative…The failure to do so threatens to exact a heavy price on the tens of millions of Americans whose pain is severe and disabling, and who are not driving the drug overdose epidemic.”
The articles cites both “Clinicians and health experts as saying that the CDC “needs to make clear, in a high-profile way, what the guidelines were – and were not – meant to address”, and quotes Dr. Richard “Red” Lawhern as stating, “The resulting document is fatally flawed and needs to be withdrawn for a major revision in an open public process by qualified experts in community practice for chronic pain treatment, assisted by representatives or advocates from chronic pain communities.”
The article also comes to a universal conclusion that we’ve heard from chronic pain patients and healthcare professionals alike – “that regulators and law enforcement authorities must stay in their lane, so to speak, and not interfere in the doctor-patient relationship in an effort to address the largely illegal opioid crisis.”
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So, why is this all so important, if chronic pain patients have been saying this since the guidelines were published?
As we have stated before – this news adds a new voice to the “opioid crisis” narrative that has been told by mainstream media over the last few years – an we applaud Fox News for this reporting.
Over the years, National Pain Report has received thousands of comments and emails, pleading the (valid) question of, “why is the story of the chronic pain patient left out of the “opioid crisis?”
Well…here we are – the “other side” of the story is now starting to get some traction.
Still, we receive comments and emails saying, “these stories aren’t enough…”
You’re right. They are not enough. But they’re the next step. And unless embraced and supported, this moment may come and go.
However, this is an opportunity to embrace and share the coverage. A moment to support the journalism that exposes the inequities and unintended victims and shortcomings of the opioid crisis and the CDC’s guidelines for prescribing opioids.
As you know, there IS a story here, and journalists are beginning to understand that. So help them tell that story. Help them spread this story. Assist in the distribution and education of those who have had no exposure to the fact that their is an immense population of responsible people who rely on their doctors ability to prescribe the very medicine created to treat their pain.
We may sound like a broken record – but let’s not squander this moment, let’s magnify it.