Yesterday the House passed the National Pain Care Policy Act of 2008. The National Pain Foundation, led a coalition of organizations including the CFIDS Association of America, to introduce this legislation and secure a House vote before the 110th session of Congress ends. For more information, please visit www.painfoundation.org
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It is time we had a pain care policy that ensures that patients with legitimate pain are able to get the medications they need.
In my case, one doctor wouldn't believe that I had arthritis because I had no x-rays showing it, but wouldn't order the x-rays himself. As with the other doctors at that medical group, absolutely no interest in ordering any test that might provide the objective evidence needed to support my Disability application, only interested in ordering tests that should be normal. And since the only test results they had were normal, they saw no need to prescribe pain medication.
Eventually, I saw someone willing to do x-rays, and, among other things, he found 3 fractured vertebrae that looked to be about 10 years old and NO ONE had ever discovered them because no one had ever looked for a source of the pain, other than assuming I was exaggerating. When I told him the other doctors had called me a wimp who couldn't take a little pain, he laughed -- only someone with an extremely high tolerance for pain would break their spine and not even know it!
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