Autumn 2005
O'Shaughnessy's
Journal of the California Cannabis Research Medical
Group
|
The Myth of Available Treatment
By Frank Fisher, MD
The myth of available treatment is alive and well. If it were up to
the medical profession, the pain issue would never move. In fact, members
of the medical profession perpetrate far more than their share of the
neglect and persecution that pain victims endure.
There are two main reasons for this, and both concern ethics: (1)
The first is expediency. Given the malignant regulatory climate, the
first
ethical law of medicine has become the survival of the physician.
(2) The second issue is education —but not, as many think, education
in the field of pain management. The process of medical education
is universally flawed in the following sense. It fails to inform physicians
in training of the propensity for governments to go astray, and then
require physicians to behave unethically. This deficiency can be
compared
to a hypothetical situation in which high school civics classes neglected
to teach that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were written
to keep the government from getting out of control and turning against
the people. This failure of ethical education must be at least partially
responsible for the increasingly frequent allegations of unethical
behavior by physicians in situations like Baghdad and Guantanamo.
Fortunately, the pain crisis isn’t primarily a medical problem.
(Pain is easy to control, and we have the means close at hand to
do so.)
Hope arises from the realization that the pain crisis is instead, a human rights
issue.
In accordance with what you have observed about physicians, the pain problem
will be resolved in spite of the influence of the medical profession.