Working While Poor and In Pain in the United States

[Lyric]

15. And this is how half of supposed drug "abusers" are made.

Poor people being forced to buy pain pills (or worse, heroin) on the black market because nobody will prescribe it for them, and they HAVE to be able to work.

Trust that I know what I'm talking about here. Some would classify my best friend as a drug abuser just because she has no choice but to buy Percocet pills from a local dealer. She has major back and leg pain, but her income is necessary for her kids to survive, and she is allergic to NSAIDs. So she spends a huge chunk of her meager paycheck buying pain relief, just so she can keep the job that puts food on the table. It would be a really GOOD job if she didn't have to give up a quarter of her earnings every week to the pill guy. But no physician in this part of West Virginia will touch a pain patient who is also a Medicaid patient--at least not with a narcotic prescription.

My poor mother laid in agony for years until her condition was finally deemed "terminal" so Hospice could step in. My sister was on the verge of starting Mom on heroin, just because none of us could stand to watch her suffer anymore. Thank God for Hospice. They made my mother's last year of life bearable, finally.

The way that poor people with pain are treated is abhorrent, but what can we do? Doctors know that we aren't likely to have the resources or knowledge to sue them, and they are far more concerned with being harassed by the DEA than they are with alleviating a poor person's pain and suffering.

Then there is the phenomenon of "pseudo addiction"--where poor, suffering patients fake a painful medical condition in order to get pain medication for a *different* painful condition that is being ignored or undertreated--for example, faking a kidney stone in order to get painkillers for terrible back pain that they are suffering. They aren't lying about being in pain. But their REAL pain is relentless and horrible and is not being treated properly, so they do whatever must be done in order to get that medication.

Frankly, pain treatment for the poor in this nation is just horrific. Almost 12th century horrific. We all ought to be ashamed of allowing it to come to this. The suffering I see just within my own family is unimaginable to people who have always had their pain treated promptly and well.