Pain Advocacy Coalition

www.painadvocacycoalition.com/

Pain  Advocacy Coalition is a loose knit collaborative group of patients who live with intractable pain. We are your co-workers, neighbors, friends, and family members. We are a collaborative group of former police officers, former nurses, researchers, technical writers, social media consultants, medical assistants and other varied professional backgrounds. We all share one common bond, we live with chronic pain daily, and many of us use opioids as a treatment modality to help us manage our pain effectively. We are not a volunteer organization. We are a tribe of individuals who are crowd-sourcing a solution to a common problem impacting our lives via collaborative tools. We are inviting the pain community to participate.

The medical administration of opioids for analgesia are utilized in tandem with other medical treatments, individualized to the patient’s needs, and are implemented only when other treatments are not successful for relieving pain. The use of prescribed opioid analgesia permits us to successfully participate in activities of daily living and to meet our obligations.

Opioids, when used as an analgesic, allow us to redeem some quality of life from intractable pain. Often, we experience only partial relief from analgesics. We are not able to participate in our lives at the same capacity as we once did prior to becoming pain patients. However, without opioid analgesics, many of us would decline further, experience decreased mobility, increased pain, decreased productivity and other negative outcomes.

The “opioid crisis” and the implementation of draconian policies by Center for Disease Control (CDC) that restrict prescribing opioids for legitimate pain patients have mobilized the pain community to coalesce and address the negative impact these policies have had on our community.

The Pain Advocacy Coalition grassroots movement is dedicated to addressing the “opioid crisis” by:

• raising public awareness about the impact of pain on patients, both acute and chronic
• bringing transparency to the negative impact the Center for Disease Control’s guidelines have had on the pain community and their healthcare providers
• challenging the status quo and empowering pain patients to utilize collaborative tools and platforms
• participating in a national conversation about our healthcare decisions that previously the pain community has largely been excluded from
• restoring the patient- physician- pharmacist relationship
• preventing detrimental special interest and government interference in the provision of medical care
• challenging stigma, discrimination, profiling, narrow narrative and marginalization that contribute to the obstacles and barriers that pain patients experience
• challenging the media to to offer the public balanced reporting about the “opioid crisis” including equal time outlining the impact to pain patients (acute/ chronic) and the medical community at large
• challenging the methods by which data is obtained, research is conducted, how research is funded and how statistics are being utilized to make individual medical decisions from a board room, a legislative office, third party administrator’s office or an oversight office

We intend to bring transparency to restrictive policies that are not thought of as patient-centric, but are more accurately described as profit driven. For a more expansive examination of this complex issue, check out the Pain Advocacy Coalition’s Platform.

For an expanded look at the issues pain patients across the country are facing check out this recent news report by I-team reporter George Knapp and his fellow reporters courtesy of LasVegasNow- KLAS-TV-8 report published on December 1, 2017.

Filed under: General Problems