My response to recent article on Pain News Network

This article posted 6-14-19: “Why Do Doctors Keep Pushing Invasive Procedures on Me?” — Pain News Network

It’s always been about the money. There’s little risk to the physician for doing an injection or other procedure that garners them thousands of dollars, but now with the extreme push on the deprescribing of opiates due to the improperly interpreted CDC Guidelines adopted by state medical boards, it’s too risky to just prescribe opiate pain medications. Why would they want to jeopardize their “cash cow” or “golden egg” that earns them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, if not more, on writing inexpensive prescriptions for those pain medications that keep patients more active and engaged in their lives? They risk DEA raids, medical board sanctions, insurance company reviews, and more when they continue to write prescriptions. To them the money is more important than the patient’s quality of life; always has been, always will be. I’ve called out neurosurgeons who are overly aggressive with surgeries and such only to be slandered by them to patients. I’ve seen medical boards discipline family practitioners such as me for “over-prescribing,” but fail to do anything about physician assistants working at pain specialist offices who fail to document care properly, fail to perform physical examinations, miss critical heart murmurs, and more. They are allowed to continue to prescribe higher doses due to their “expertise,” yet they fail to provide better care, yet drug test more often just to make more money. When I treat chronic pain patients, our appointments are longer than those with the specialists, yet our office is derided by other local offices as just being “pill-pushers.” We are keeping our patients at work, at school, and more. Yet the other offices don’t care about that. They gladly discriminate against the lower economic class by outright lying to them. They claim that they don’t write opiate prescriptions anymore, when in reality they do. But they only do it for their “good-paying” insured patients. If you have Oregon Health Plan or Medicare, no pills for you! Same medical conditions yet two different practice policies only based on insurance! Who’s in it for the money? Easy to see.