| One-Minute Clinician
Chronic Pain Patients: A Personal View
- Patients with chronic pain spend a lot of time on social media looking for answers, looking for help. I personally receive hundreds, if not thousands, of emails a year from patients crying out for help.
- They’re not even asking for opioids: they say “I just need help. As soon as a provider finds out I have pain, nobody wants to see me; they treat me differently.”
- The person or persons they feel they could rely on—healthcare providers—are basically shunting them away, and it’s a shame. My experience has been that there are a very few pain medicine providers left who really want to prescribe opioids.