Pain Relief Network Calls NIDA’s Addiction Conference a Shameful Charade

SANTA FE, N.M., March 5 /PRNewswire/ —

“Our nation’s most respected clinicians join together to lend credence to    the neuro-mythology of addiction at the March 5th and 6th NIDA Conference    in Washington D.C.; this, while patients in severe pain are locked out of    care due to the ongoing government crackdown on pain treating physicians.    Academic pain medicine has lost sight of its ethical obligation to    protect patients and is now marching to the beat of the US Department of    Justice.” – Siobhan Reynolds, Founder and President, Pain Relief Network.    http://www.painreliefnetwork.org/prn/410.php   

While the general breakdown in the Federal government’s competence is well-known — with the scandals of Katrina, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and now Walter Reed’s systemic failure featured prominently in the media — government officials and complicit academics who oversee the medical treatment of pain in the U.S. are participating in the government’s campaign to divert attention away from the worsening public health disaster caused by the Bush Administration’s crackdown on pain treating physicians. Even before the Bush Administration launched its unlawful campaign against medical pain management, more than 10 million Americans were struggling to survive in severe, out-of- control pain. Not surprisingly, the U.S. government keeps no record of suicides resulting from untreated pain. http://tinyurl.com/yp4e4o

For those few patients who are still able to access the medicines they need to function and maintain their dignity, their medical relationships have morphed into a captor/prisoner scenario, with all the attendant brutality such an unsupervised situation provokes. The following article describing the system-wide abuse of patients appeared in a widely read journal, Practical Pain Management. http://tinyurl.com/2c87lm

And yet the so-called thought leaders who are participating in this NIDA charade are perpetuating the socio-political madness, otherwise known as official concern about addiction, putting even more pressure on an already badly distorted doctor/patient relationship.

How did we get here, you ask? Take the time to read the following groundbreaking paper by Alexander Deluca, M.D., MPH on our nation’s perpetual war on people in pain and the doctors who treat them. http://tinyurl.com/2ayc96

Whether she knows it or not, Dr. Nora Volkow is in the thrall of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the President’s official drug- propagandist. While going into mind-numbing detail about how brains look on drugs, she then proposes to cure addiction with AA meetings. In better days, and on other occasions, Dr. Volkow was able to remember that drug dependence and the phenomenon we call drug addiction have virtually nothing to do with one another. http://tinyurl.com/yq7wzk

But Dr. Volkow’s flip-flopping is characteristic of the Kafkaesque discourse surrounding the deeply flawed concept of addiction. As Dr. Dale Atrens writes in an illuminating paper on the tower of Babel that is addiction, “The belief in addiction exists, not because of scientific information, but in spite of it. It is old-fashioned demonology, thinly disguised as science.” http://tinyurl.com/yrzot5

   Download the complete Press-Packet at: http://tinyurl.com/2xpxyc     CONTACT:    Siobhan Reynolds    Pain Relief Network    505-989-3929    505-995-6201    sreynolds@painreliefnetwork.org    http://www.painreliefnetwork.org/    http://www.painreliefnetwork.org/prn/press-packet.php   

This release was issued through eReleases(TM). For more information, visit http://www.ereleases.com/.

Pain Relief Network

CONTACT: Siobhan Reynolds of Pain Relief Network, +1-505-989-3929, +1-505-995-6201, or sreynolds@painreliefnetwork.org

Web site: http://www.painreliefnetwork.org/