Dr. Nicholas Atanasoff : Don’t Punish Pain

Nicholas Anthony Atanasoff, D.O. lives and works in Boardman, Ohio as an addiction specialist.

Pain is the alarm that tells us something is wrong and is one of the main reasons why individuals seek medical care. However, when that alarm does not turn off (e.g., in patients with cancer, arthritis, or nervous system abnormalities) despair can often take over. Further, virtually every authoritative health, medical, and human rights group throughout the world once formally declared that relief from pain is a universal human right, including access to opioid analgesics, if necessary.

Fortunately, the majority of people with persistent, recurrent, or chronic pain do not require ongoing opioid therapy, especially when they have access to other effective treatments. However, when non-opioid pain management strategies do not work, opioids (in combination with other medical, behavioral, and rehabilitative therapies) can be the only means of providing a life that is functional and worth living. Each of the bedeviling condition of intractable pain and drug addiction rob patients of this "unalienable right," and deserve our best attentions, starting by neither blaming nor confusing one for the other. It is important that we do not let the war on drugs lead to untreated pain, cautions Nicholas Anthony Atanasoff, D.O.