A Continuation of the Chronic Pain Series
Once upon a time, trust helped define medicine.
When reassurance from your doctor was a hand on your shoulder, not risk; when telling the truth about pain, medication, and the limits of endurance didn’t make you a suspect.
I hate typing this, but those days are gone, and in their place stands a system built on fear, suspicion, and the quiet collapse of compassion.
What you’ll be reading isn’t isolated cries from the dark; these stories are proof of what happens when bureaucracy replaces any judgment from the bedside and when the war on opioids becomes a war on the sick.
Fear Behind the Mask
Incognito, asking to remain anonymous for reasons far too common:
Isn’t that disgusting that we have to live in fear over this? Doctors are suspicious of patients, patients are suspicious of doctors, and pharmacists are suspicious of both. The people who don’t understand will throw “pharma shill” and “junkie” at us for speaking about this very real situation. I have been in this fight for about 10 years, and it keeps getting worse. I don’t know how long it’ll take, but more people need to speak up.
Incognito’s story stretches back to a childhood illness and a body that betrayed her early, followed by a system that later betrayed her. Nothing major, just pneumonia at six weeks, rheumatic fever at 10, a herniated disc at 14, and years of sciatica after that. She did, through it all, what Americans have been taught to do: work hard, stay tough, and trust that the promise of medicine was solid.
After years of dismissals, she finally received an adhesive arachnoiditis diagnosis, finding herself in the care of one of the few specialists still willing to treat patients targeted by regulators. Even after being hounded for daring to practice compassion, she said, “God sent me an angel.”
The fear she held was vivid.
The addiction industry and the mass tort lawyers, with the help of some NGOs and others, have made torturing us their favorite gig. I was terrified of becoming addicted. I asked my husband to tell me if I showed signs… that never happened.
She did one thing wrong, something that hasn’t even been considered—not once—a crime of trust. That trust, once sacred between doctor and patient, was turned against her.
Hellbound and Down 