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This is a bigger issue than just what Rush is going through. It is effecting millions of chronic pain patients who are losing access to the medication they rely on to make their lives bareable.

Anyone who needs oxycontin and vicodin for severe back pain or cancer pain can go to a pain management specialist and receive it around the clock. Look in your yellow pages.

Umm...thanks for the advice...Doc. I already have a pain management specialist. But that doesn't matter when doctors start getting locked up....and pharmacies start refusing to dispense the medication for fear of prosecution. You don't seem to understand that the government and the media is scaring the legitimate practitoners into submission. Just visit www.painreliefnetwork.org and see the hysteria that has been created. You, as a doctor should be well aware of the problem.

[It is effecting millions of chronic pain patients who are losing access to the medication they rely on to make their lives bareable.]

Anyone who needs oxycontin and vicodin for severe back pain or cancer pain can go to a pain management specialist and receive it around the clock. Look in your yellow pages.

With all due respect, that's 100% horse manure.

Yes, there are "pain management specialists" in the yellow pages. No, they do not just turn on unending spigots of painkillers even if you're in chronic pain.

They will prescribe painkillers on a short-term basis for temporary pain like post-surgical pain, but long-term pain issues they withdraw the painkiller prescriptions after a few months and the "management" part comes into play, which is little more than encouraging the patient to "suck it up, nothing we can do for you."

I've got years of personal experience with this, because for years my wife had atypical acute chronic migraines (which literally did not let up for *months* at a time). Despite being reduced to a bedridden invalid from the crushing pain, the "pain management" doctors just shrugged their shoulders, saying that continuous painkiller prescriptions were simply not an option (for *any* patient except those who are going to die soon anyway).

And through chronic illness support groups, we meet dozens of other people who had had the exact same experience with "pain management" specialists.

So don't try to tell us how "anyone" who needs pain medication can "recieve it around the clock". Not for more than a week or two, anyway. After that, you're on your own.

Pain Management Specialists are not available to many because of location or even the cause of the pain. I (as discussed in another thread) have experienced intractable pain due to a GI problem. It was nothing a Pain Specialist could have helped with---only surgery. I doctor shopped until I found someone willing to go the extra mile to diagnose a physical condition which is uncommon and aggressively treat my pain instead of telling me to "relax tough it out" (as I heard many, many times before).