Don’t Blame Pain Docs

I am writing in regard to the article on Special Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget Brennan [“Scripts and the City,” Fall 2013]. There is a war against pain-medicine physicians and pain-medication prescriptions, and this should be changed.

[According to the Institute of Medicine], there are 116 million Americans with chronic pain, and some estimates state that 50 percent of suicides are related to chronic pain. Primary-care physicians are treated like criminals now for trying to treat chronic-pain patients, and that makes it hard for the approximately one-third of the population with chronic pain to get treated.We need major changes in pain management in the United States.

Tad Taylor PhD’83 (also an MD)
Plano, Texas

Published in the Winter 2013 issue