Dorlee

[David Smith @DavidESmitty]

Read stories about patient harms (and deaths), or, submit a story of your own, on the National Campaign to Protect People in Pain (NCP3) website!
Since we have federal health agency Advisors who still deny that such harms (and deaths) are happening as a direct result of the fraudulent, unscientific, unnecessary, and inhumane opioid restrictions that are based on the fraudulent claims coming from inside the health agencies and their Advisory Committees, all the advocacy groups have decided that it is up to US to begin to document these events!
https://t.co/aW2V7ItRdb

Eventually, we hope that the health agencies will decide to finally track patient outcome, especially since the Dept of HHS reported to Congress in 2020 that this needed to be done BEFORE any prescribing recommendations were made or enacted!

[Bev Schechtman🇮🇱 @ibdgirl76]

Keep screaming about the Sacklers while we get these stories, like this one that just came in :"My mom got tylenol only for one day post OP from hip replacement and a broken shoulder. I was so fkng pissed"

[Bev Schechtman🇮🇱 @ibdgirl76]

New patient story: "My mom refused life saving measures for cancer because oncologist refused pain medication." But, sure keep talking about "the opioid crisis" like it is 2003.

[Church of the Almighty Pit Bull @blu_noz_pitbull]

@MalloryGates14 Since we turned doctors into police. I go to medical "enforcement" not medical "care" appts now. I'm a chronic pain pt on long-term opioids for pain management. We turned pain care over to addiction medicine in this country and now everyone is an addict. I even have to do UAs! 🙅‍♀️

[David Smith @DavidESmitty]

DPF identified 17 different studies that show that forcing stable patients off their opioid pain medications causes harm. The health agencies, their Advisory Committees, lawmakers, medical boards, hospital systems, and medical schools continue to push policies based on fraudulent claims about "prescription opioid medications."
Why?
Who benefits?
The opioid restrictions are NOT reducing the number of deaths from illicit fentanyl analog compound poisonings, the stated purpose of the restrictions.
WE NEED ANSWERS!
https://t.co/mgJlu9W0P3

[Dr Hoss T, PhD @hoss_tagge]

No one dies from rx opioid pain medication taken as directed. 99%+ of pain patients use pain medications taken as directed. Those deaths have almost nothing to do with pain patients, MDs, and pain management.

[Claudia A. Merandi @CMerandi]

Pain Medicine News claiming “nurse guided virtual follow up” is effective pain control

Let’s ask this nurse who sustained first-degree burns and was denied pain medication.

No wonder ppl are dying by suicide

@LynnRWebsterMD are you serious?

[Bev Schechtman🇮🇱 @ibdgirl76]

But what have you done to help people in pain who no longer have access to opioids due to those settlements? I reached out to you in 2018 when you were the Attorney General begging for your help. Things have gotten exponentially worse. Just wondering why only people with addiction matter, and those with severe debilitating pain don’t seem to count.

[Sassy Devil Dog 🔥 @VinoNStrosGal]

IT NEVER CEASES TO AMAZE ME how quickly people recognize psychological
trauma in almost every setting except healthcare.

A soldier comes home hypervigilant, we understand.

Someone leaves an abusive relationship and rehearses every word before speaking, we understand.

Someone gets bitten by a dog and becomes fearful around dogs, we understand.

But a chronic pain patient walks into an exam room with rehearsed explanations, symptom logs, medication histories, anxiety, and the instinct to downplay their suffering, and somehow we’re supposed to pretend that appeared out of nowhere.

Many of us learned to scan faces before speaking.

We learned to measure our words.

Not too emotional.
Not too calm.
Not too detailed.
Not too vague.

We learned to shrink our pain into something socially acceptable.

Because after enough interrogations, enough suspicion, enough humiliation, enough being treated like a problem to manage instead of a person to help, your nervous system adapts.

And then people call it anxiety.

No.

Anxiety is what they see.

Conditioning is what happened.

Then society asks why chronic pain patients hesitate to seek care,

like asking someone why they flinch when they’ve spent years being told, “this won’t hurt,” right before it did.

[Sassy Devil Dog 🔥 @VinoNStrosGal]

One of the strangest realities in medicine is watching people in physical pain move through a maze of medications:

"Try the antidepressant."

"Try the anticonvulsant."

"Try the nerve medication."

"Try the sleep medication."

"Try the anxiety medication."

And somewhere in the middle of it,
a question quietly starts forming:

How did we reach a point where the search for relief can sometimes leave people carrying even more to manage?

Because the cruel irony for some patients is this:

They walked into the appointment with pain.

And eventually found themselves still managing the pain, while carrying burdens they never walked in with:

exhaustion, brain fog, disrupted sleep, emotional blunting, frightening thoughts, and a body that suddenly feels harder to recognize.

People go in asking for less suffering.

Not more of it.

[Dora Winterz @DoraWinterz]

The inversion happened in pain medicine too.

Stable chronic pain patients — with MRIs, surgical histories, documented disease, and years of physician oversight — were stripped of medication, abandoned by their doctors, denied at pharmacies, and recast as risks instead of patients.

The moral calculus flipped completely.

The careful became suspect.
The compliant became expendable.
The medically documented patient became collateral in a crisis framed entirely around addiction.

Then came the cruelest inversion of all:
The very patients blamed for the crisis were pushed out of stable medical care while the illicit market grew more lethal than ever.

Medical access collapsed.
Illicit fentanyl surged.
Overdoses exploded.

The system manufactured the catastrophe it claimed it was preventing.

#SavingUsToDeath

[Sassy Devil Dog 🔥 @VinoNStrosGal]

What’s disturbing is how quickly society accepted this framing.

The moment someone becomes a chronic pain patient, their suffering stops being viewed through the lens of care and starts being viewed through the lens of suspicion.

Every refill becomes a moral evaluation.

Every expression of fear becomes
“drug-seeking.”

Every attempt to preserve quality of life gets psychologically filtered through addiction narratives before humanity.

Meanwhile, people living in relentless pain are expected to remain perfectly composed while their bodies, finances, relationships, careers, and nervous systems slowly erode in real time.

And somehow the public was convinced this was compassion.

[Lelena @LelenaPeacock]

Pain patient outcomes are not tracked, Grok.

That's a fiction, especially after the opioid crisis.

[Sassy Devil Dog 🔥 @VinoNStrosGal]

“A striking shift in overdose trends.”

No. Let’s use the correct word.

Poisonings.

Because what these numbers actually represent is a generation of abandoned pain patients being pushed out of legitimate medical care and into a contaminated street supply by a system that spent the last decade treating suffering like a public relations problem.

And it is astonishingly on brand that one of the clearest indicators of this catastrophe is sitting on a post with three likes from a niche medical account while the people responsible for creating this disaster still get booked on podcasts, quoted in newspapers, and applauded at policy conferences.

A compliant 68-year-old chronic pain patient with severe degenerative spine disease or failed back surgery syndrome doesn’t suddenly wake up one morning looking for fentanyl and xylazine.

He spends 30 years doing everything “the right way.”

Monthly appointments.
Urine screens.
Pill counts.
No early refills.
No criminal history.
No misuse.

Then one day, the clinic cuts him down or cuts him off entirely because the culture of medicine became more terrified of prescribing opioids than of watching human beings deteriorate in agony.

The CDC guidelines get distorted into law.

PROP activists go on media tours.

Andrew Kolodny frames dependency itself as moral failure.

Politicians need a villain.
Physicians get intimidated.
Patients become collateral damage.

And when pain becomes unbearable, withdrawal becomes dangerous, and desperation eclipses fear, some of those patients go to the street supply they were told would “never happen” to them.

That counterfeit pill isn’t medicine.
It’s chemical roulette.

Fentanyl.
Carfentanil.
Nitazenes.

Not overdoses.
POISONINGS.

The system created conditions where medically abandoned patients were funneled toward an illicit market more lethal than anything sitting in a pharmacy bottle.

And now we’re watching older adults die in staggering numbers while the same people who helped manufacture this crisis pretend not to understand why.

The most grotesque part?

These statistics barely move the algorithm.

Because chronic pain patients were never useful enough for society to protect, only visible enough to blame.

[Outonalimb @2BOutonalimb]

The CDC admits that overdose deaths among the 65 plus population surged 9000% since the latest war on opioids. They actually want us dead. It hasn’t saved any street addicts, and has killed untold thousands of chronic pain patients. https://t.co/59VcCl3KtP

[Dorlee @beachbum458]

@Katamac1967 We're all just being experimented on..involuntary used in studies. Someday you'll see commercials on tv asking if you or a loved one was abused by lack of pain treatment, call....lawyers office for class action suit. Told my doc this and he said I'm probably right. Inhumane.

[David Smith @DavidESmitty]

We have the FIRST GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL now stating that harms have come to patients as a result of the opioid policies (the policies that I maintain are fraudulent).
CELEBRATE THE VICTORY!
@AZAGMayes

[Bev Schechtman🇮🇱 @ibdgirl76]

@ONDCP @samhsagov it's been a decade now of ignoring the harm done to people in pain in the name of "prevention." Not one mention of any of this in your recent report. You couldn't even manage to put one tiny sentence about it. Nobody is excluded from this opioid elimination harm. Not cancer patients, not SCD patients, not hospice patients. It's been over a decade and you're still ignoring this. Who will be the first to actually acknowledge it?

Another patient story: "my son’s father cough medicine with pain medicine or even just hydrocodone. He is a Veteran and has a cancerous growth in his throat that has doubled in size over the last few weeks. This man has never asked for pain medicine in his life."

[Church of the Almighty Pit Bull @blu_noz_pitbull]

@ibdgirl76 @ONDCP I want to vomit listening to them claim they wake up every day trying to save lives. That drug free Americans are the only worthy Americans. While they take whatever they want, whenever they want. 🤬 Infuriating!

[Bev Schechtman🇮🇱 @ibdgirl76]

While @ONDCP put out another drug strategy ignoring the crisis of pain patient abandonment, forced tapers, and extortion of patients for costly and harmful interventional pain procedures, we keep hearing these stories:
"I have been cut off of Percocet after 25 years 0ne doctor retired and his replacement cut off my meds at the first appointment " Read more horror stories: https://t.co/AdKrtRrZat