By Ann Marie Gaudon, PNN Columnist

For years now, chronic pain patients in Canada and elsewhere have heard nothing but disingenuous and downright nonsensical information about opioid medication.

It’s beginning to feel like a cheese grater scraping on my very real nerves. No facts or just wrong facts from the government, regulators and the media. Are all of these players living in an alternate reality?

Rewind back to June 2, when pain patient and advocate Paul arranged a meeting between several physicians and pain patients. You can find out the whole story, as Paul told it to me, on this YouTube video. The sole doctor attending the meeting had one objective: To present (via PowerPoint no less) how “responsible and non-biased” leaders and physicians are when it comes to pain patients.

Indeed, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario put out “A Message to Patients Living with Chronic Non-Cancer Pain.” It tells us it is “never appropriate to abandon a patient on long-term opioid therapy or abruptly cut off or threaten to cut off a patient’s medication” and that “patients taking prescribed opioids should not be stigmatized.”

In its guideline for accepting new patients, the college also tells us that “physicians must accept new patients in a manner that is fair, transparent and respectful…”

However, doctors live in their own reality, far apart from their college. In the real world of pain care where I reside, doctors everywhere and every day: 

• Refuse to prescribe opioid medication for their patients

• Abandon pain patients altogether because they need opioid medication

• Drastically taper opioid medication against their patients’ wills and to the detriment of their health and quality of life

• Stigmatize and discriminate against patients, who are labeled as addicted and in need of treatment

• Refuse to accept new pain patients if they need opioid medication 

This picture of a doctor's window in Ontario reflects that reality:

What we experience in the real world doesn’t have any relation to what we are being told. I recently listened to a fascinating interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Christopher Hedges, who spoke about a “post-truth phenomena.”

“The facts don’t matter, we’re bombarded with lies…. Once facts are interchangeable with opinions, then it becomes an Alice in Wonderland kind of experience where nothing makes sense,” said Hedges

We are now living that experience, complete with mythology. The myth about pain patients is that they are cared for by an ethical medical establishment according to their own unique needs, and also recognized as valuable citizens deserving of human rights by a responsible government.

Mythologies were created by ancient peoples trying to make sense of the world. If you live in an alternate reality, you would need to create these narratives so that your distorted reality made sense to you.

For those of us whose bodies are pained and whose minds remain firmly planted on this earth, the myths about opioids are misrepresentations at best, pure hypocrisy and deceit at worst.

Sometimes peoples of the past got it wrong, but sometimes they got it right. Seventeenth century philosophers used the fundamental nature of knowledge and their reality to make sense of the world. Voltaire cautioned us not to take the myths too seriously.

"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities."

Ann Marie Gaudon is a registered social worker and psychotherapist in the Waterloo region of Ontario, Canada with a specialty in chronic pain management.  She has been a chronic pain patient for 33 years and works part-time as her health allows. For more information about Ann Marie's counseling services, visit her website.

The information in this column should not be considered as professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. It is for informational purposes only and represents the author’s opinions alone. It does not inherently express or reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of Pain News Network.