Thread...How people in pain are being abused.
Let us count the ways.
1-Emotional Abuse:
Invalidation of person's lived experience
Distrust
Gaslighting
Ridicule
Threats
Constant monitoring of activities
Judgment/punishment #ChronicPain#WeWillNotStaySilent
2-Intellectual Abuse
Being forced to prove your abuser wrong
Mind games
Making the person in pain feel stupid
Attacking the person in pain's ideas or wishes
Manipulation of information, even in medical records
Power Imbalance
3-Financial Abuse
Forcing person to attend needless appointments
requiring co-payments, transportation costs, paying for 'alternative' modalities, Coerced into costly surgeries and 'minimally invasive' procedures, endless lifelong drug testing.
4-Pet Abuse
The fear of #Opioids has now spilled over into the lack of pain treatment for pets.
Especially if owner is a pain patient.
Due to perceived possibility an owner who receives pain medicine might be trying to 'get drugs', their pets are now denied needed pain control.
5-Psychological Abuse
Threats
Abandonment
Accusing pt that they're 'faking' 'maligering' 'drug seeking'
Ignoring messages
Practices that lead to person in pain becoming isolated
Using family to target person in pain with fear/shame
Inflicting trauma due to untreated pain
6-Physical Abuse
Not treating pain
Forced procedures to avoid RXing controlled medicine
Abandonment of people who are severely ill/injured
7-Verbal Abuse
Belittling
Being yelled at
Being insulted
Talking to the person with condescension
Speaking in anger, and with disdain
Chastising patient for their use of certain medicines
8-Spiritual Abuse
Putting down the patient's beliefs/Forcing other religious practices
Using faith or 'mind over matter' to manipulate
Shaming/accusing person in pain of not 'having faith'
Using terms like 'suffering makes us stronger' as an excuse to withhold medicines.
9-Social Abuse
Perpetuating isolation through untreated pain
Preventing the patient's ability to work due to undertreated or untreated pain
Creating stigma or false social perceptions due to patient's use of controlled medicine through ongoing PROPaganda campaigns
10-People in pain are a silenced and desperate group of people.
They are comprised of some of the most vulnerable among us-
The sick, injured, elderly, and dying.
None of this is ok. #WeWillNotStaySilent
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1- They call it protection, but it's punishment
for people who have done nothing wrong.
A war on drugs that forgot the wounded
left the sick in the crossfire,
and buried compassion under an avalanche of bureaucracy and lies.
2- CDC dropped a guideline like a guillotine—
PROP’s manifesto dressed as medicine
but it wasn’t healing, it was erasure.
A one-size-fits-none decree that turned doctors into gatekeepers and patients into suspects.
3-Let’s talk about desperation.
Let’s talk about the cancer patient who can’t sleep through the screams in her bones. The veteran with shrapnel in his spine-told to try yoga. The mother with CRPS who’s offered a pamphlet on mindfulness while her nerves light up like fireworks.
1- Our pain is not just in our bones or nerves, and it's not just in our heads. It lives in the silence after we speak the truth about our pain and are met with disbelief. It festers in the sterile smiles of professionals who dismiss our agony with platitudes or excuses.
2-We begin to vanish from our own stories.
Rooms shrink.
Conversations end too quickly if they happen at all.
We become the unbearable weight in the room everyone pretends doesn't exist.
3-We are bound in bodies that betrayed us-but worse still, we carry the burden of the betrayal of not being believed. Chronic pain turns time into an enemy. Days begin to blur into decades of calendars of missed invitations; our absence misunderstood as an excuse.
1-And to wrap things up today...
This is our Critical Analysis of fallout from the 'opioid crisis scam'.
Misattribution of Deaths: The lack of IMF testing until the mid-2000s falsely attributed overdoses to prescription opioids, inflating their perceived role.
#PainCareCrisis
2-It was clear by 2015, (due to more widespread testing upon death), IMF was the dominant driver of drug poisinings, yet policies like the CDC’s guidelines and DEA’s quota cuts continued targeting prescriptions, harming patients without addressing illicit markets.
3-Policy Overreach & the made up "overprescribing" narrative justified one-size-fits-all regulations; ignoring patient diversity. The CDC’s 2022 guideline update acknowledged harm from rigid limits-but the CHILLING EFFECT contines due to DEA scrutiny and pharmacy gatekeeping.
1-Continuing the conversation about how the 'opioid crisis' scam is harming and killing vulnerable patients with serious illnesses and injuries...
#PainCareCrisis
2-Harmful Outcomes: Forced tapering or discontinuation increases risks of suicide, mental health crises, and illicit drug use. A 2019 Health Affairs analysis linked restrictive policies to an 8% rise in suicides among chronic pain patients.
3-Some abandoned patients with debilitating conditions turning to fentanyl-laced street drugs after losing prescriptions, with one user on X stating, “Doctors abandoned me; the street was my only option.”
1-An overview of my conversation with @Grok, on how the 'opioid crisis' scam is harming vulnerable patients/ a scam that's led to policies which severely limit access to opioids, benzodiazepines, and ADHD medications, devastating patients who rely on them.
2-"Overprescribing" lacks a clear legal or medical definition. It is a made up term that emerged in the late 1990s and 2000s as a catch-all term to describe high prescription opioid volumes based on a medically baseless maximum 'morphine milligram equivalent', or MME.
3-The made up term was popularized by media, advocacy groups, and regulators to frame prescription opioids as the primary driver of rising overdose deaths, despite limited evidence isolating their impact from illicit drugs.
This is a cry for help!
Not because I’m considering suicide.
This is a cry for help for millions in pain. It’s a cry for those who are taking their own lives to end the agony they've been told that they just need to learn to accept.
#PainCareCrisis
2-It’s a rallying cry for people to start talking about what’s happening, what has been happening for years now, to people with serious illnesses & injuries in this country. Virtually no one is talking about this in the public forum-This is the other side of the ‘opioid crisis’.
3-There are people right now watching the news, rightfully outraged when they see profiling and discrimination, human rights abuses, violations of civil liberties and civil rights.