MyPainAlert

Authors of pain communication scale/training tools for all ages to effectively, easily get needs met. Speech Lang. Pathologist, artist, and Mom+child with pain.

[MyPainAlert @MyPainAlert]

@TimothyPSmith7 @PainSteals Certainly it exacerbated attack on some medications which are not designed to fit a receptor.

[MyPainAlert @MyPainAlert]

@ABC why is this not closed captioned?

[MyPainAlert @MyPainAlert]

@autcareandshare Putting plans and reasons in writing is part of being a speech therapist or any teacher or therapeutic professional. I think very little of qualitative words in the middle of reports or anything that is verbal reporting only. If a treatment doesn’t show progress, try others.

[MyPainAlert @MyPainAlert]

@afshineemrani @Dina_Shakti Thanks

[MyPainAlert @MyPainAlert]

Thank to person purchasing 2 My Pain Alert Scale Communication Tool print on demand books. FYI : Free download of Are you hurting? My Pain Alert Song with professional score available at https://t.co/RWubHsQelm. ISBN for book is 0998161006. Any book store anywhere can get it

[MyPainAlert @MyPainAlert]

@_cho_ari Thanks for following. If that is your dorm room, they seriously have not improved things since I was in grad. school in 1973. Sending luck!

[MyPainAlert @MyPainAlert]

Thought you all should see this Pain article on the relationship between widespread chronic pain and heart disease. https://t.co/I46WD2mfpb

[MyPainAlert @MyPainAlert]

Does this include orienting the child to an age appropriate pain scale like My Pain Alert Scale via reading one of these books together: My Pain Alert Book or Bea-the Best Kind of Patient.?

[Paediatric Project ECHO @ECHOPaeds]

Wondering how to better prepare children with medical complexity for major orthopaedic surgery?

Join “Major Musculoskeletal Surgery in the Care of CMC” in our Pediatric Complex Care series.
Presented by Dr. Richard Gardner, paediatric orthopaedic surgeon at @SickKidsNews.

🗓️ Apr 23 | ⏰12:00–1:00 PM.
👉 Register now: https://t.co/8GaRMnjaL9

[MyPainAlert @MyPainAlert]

@HelenBorel1 thanks!

[MyPainAlert @MyPainAlert]

@MikScarlet i believe it is a major problem with pain scales asking the patient to rate their pain against their own experience. Many people can't, due to memory issues, education, etc. It encourages gaming the system, or undertreating the pain due to mistrust of the patient. Not good.

[Chad D. Kollas, MD (he/him) @ChadDKollas]

I am officially on my last nerve today with medical disinformation on opioid therapy and pharmacists who are at the peak of the curve that describes the Dunning Kruger Effect (original paper from 1999 can be found at https://t.co/Pt3h3zwIJw).

Here are the facts about opioid therapy:

1) The @US_FDA has approved opioid analgesics as safe and effective when prescribed appropriately for moderate-to-severe pain. Because they are safe and effective when prescribed appropriately for moderate-to-severe pain.

2) It is ethically impermissible to deprive patients from an established therapeutic benefit in a randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial (RCTs); after a drug has been proven effective, studies that examine its long-term effectiveness should involve randomized comparisons to other drugs, such as in Enriched Enrollment Randomized Withdrawal (EERW) studies. Critics who wrongfully insist that we must have RCTs to justify the use of Long-term Opioid Therapy (LTOT) are either disingenuous or they are woefully uninformed (again, see the Dunning-Kruger Effect).

3) According to FDA Postmarketing Studies (PMRs) on opioid therapy, the prevalence of addiction in patients taking opioids for pain - operationalized BROADLY by the @US_FDA as patients meeting DSM-5 Criteria for moderate-to-severe opioid use disorder (OUD) - is approximately 1.5%. The prevalence of alcoholism in adults using ethanol is about 10% and the prevalence of tobacco addiction in adults who smoke is about 60-80%. Again, critics who refer to the risk of opioid addiction as "high" either lack the knowledge to appropriately contextualize that risk (Dunning-Kruger again) or they are disingenuous.

4) Buprenorphine is indeed a useful medication for treating both chronic pain and OUD, but it is too early to label it as the drug of choice for cancer pain or chronic, non-cancer pain. The largest review of buprenorphine in palliative care [Thakkar, et al. J Pain Symptom Manage. 2025 Dec 29:S0885-3924(25)01016-4] "found consistent evidence that buprenorphine was comparable to other full opioid agonists when used as both a short-acting and long-acting analgesic for palliative care patients. It also did not display significant differences in risks of adverse effect." Additionally, the authors observed, "While buprenorphine’s superior safety profile, particularly its lower risk of respiratory depression and overdose compared with full opioid agonists, is well established in the literature, none of the included palliative care studies reported on respiratory depression." Given this, it is also premature to conclude that buprenorphine is truly a safer option for LTOT than other full-acting opioids (FAOs); although that argument is a rational one, it remains unproven.

5) There is a substantial and growing body of evidence that suggests that abruptly discontinuing LTOT or reducing opioid doses too rapidly may cause patient harms including uncontrolled pain, mental health crises, increased risk of self-harm or suicide and increased risk of overdose from illicit fentalogues (See, for example, Oliva et al. BMJ. 2020 Mar 4;368). Discussions about reducing opioid dose or transitioning to buprenorphine should include a comparison of these risks versus the risks of LTOT. Additionally, clinicians must transition from a recovery model of illness to a model that acknowledges that some patients have PERMANENT, INTRACTABLY PAINFUL conditions that justify the use of LTOT under the ethical principle of double-effect.

6) The systemic vilification of opioid medications that began with the 2012 PROP Petition to the FDA on Opioid Labeling occurred - at least in part - to support large-scale multidistrict litigation (MDL) against opioid manufacturers and distributors. Many of the medical experts involved these lawsuits inappropriately influenced federal opioid policy despite having undisclosed financial and professional conflicts of interest that should have disqualified them from participating in the policy creation process [see Kollas CD, Boyer-Kollas B. Chapter 15: Laws and Policies Affecting Pain Management in the United States. Bonica’s Management of Pain, 6th Edition (James P. Rathmell JP, Edwards RR, Gilligan CJ). Wolters Kluwer, 2026, ISBN: 9781975222369. In press for Fall 2026].

7) Ultimately, all pain care should be individualized and compassionate, make use of evidenced based treatments (that use both medication and non-medication-based approaches) and, when appropriate clinically, may include opioid therapy with a focus on optimizing therapeutic benefits while mitigating risks of both long- and short-term side effects, including the risk of OUD; patients with OUD or opioid addiction should enjoy the same level of access to individualized, compassionate care as patients with chronic pain. That level of care is detail-oriented, time-consuming and professionally challenging - but all of our patients deserve nothing less.

[♡⃝ @wine_x13]

There’s a mom at our school drop-off. Messy bun, always three minutes late, kids usually eating dry cereal out of a Ziploc. The "Pinterest moms" always whispered about her. I honestly felt a little bad for her.

Then one day at the playground, my neurodivergent son had a massive, violent sensory meltdown. I’m sitting in the dirt, crying, totally paralyzed.

The "perfect" moms just stared and pulled their kids away.
Suddenly, she’s there. The messy mom.

She drops her giant bag, sits right in the dirt next to us, pulls a heavy sensory toy out of her purse, and calmly shields my son from the crowd. No panic. No judgment. He regulated in three minutes. I was speechless.

We had coffee after. She told me her house is a disaster and she has severe ADHD, but she knows exactly what a nervous system collapse looks like.

I asked her how she deals with the judgmental stares from the other moms.

She took a sip of her cold coffee and said: "Perfect moms know how to bake organic muffins. Chaotic moms know how to survive the trenches."

Every time I see her running late now, I just smile. Girls, be like the messy mom. Stop apologizing for your chaos.

[MyPainAlert @MyPainAlert]

@ASanchezs65 Sending good wishes for your whole family

[MyPainAlert @MyPainAlert]

@JoeAllenNewman VA has a Traumatic Brain Injury team. My son,USAF retired, finds their holistic approach very helpful.

[MyPainAlert @MyPainAlert]

@ASanchezs65 @2StefanMoore A nice get well gift would be a Bea - the Best kind of Patient book plus card kit from https://t.co/99RtLYF5cq. Children can’t advocate for their own pain care until they understand the pain scale. For Faces type scales that is after age 8. One year olds have used sign language

[MyPainAlert @MyPainAlert]

This sounds right to me. Is it?

[ThePOTSPostman @ThePOTSPostman]

You can sleep 8 hours and still feel drained.

If your nervous system stays overstimulated, your brain doesn’t fully reset.

Regulation is what actually recharges you.

[MyPainAlert @MyPainAlert]

@JoeAllenNewman @FanaticElon I was just thinking about you and Bella. Glad you are hanging in there.

[MyPainAlert @MyPainAlert]

Blogged "Less stress with Autism and Pain" = https://t.co/8PXDidlhEB . A tool from years of speech therapy experience and solid research.

[MyPainAlert @MyPainAlert]

@ECHOPaeds I always thought there should be Patient Life Specialists for all the patients who would benefit from My Pain Alert(R) stories and My Pain Alert Scale. The stories practice using the scale (which can be recorded as 0-10 levels of pain) before there is a pain so pt. is ready.