CASE AGAINST PAIN DOCTOR IS CRUEL AND INHUMANE

Is there anybody out there who has not experienced severe pain, or does not
know a family member, relative or friend who has had to endure chronic,
unyielding pain with little or no relief?

Is there an angel in heaven who doesn't know that relieving that pain is
the right and humane thing to do?

And is there anyone, anywhere, who doesn't realize that the people best
qualified and equipped to relieve this level of pain are doctors, dedicated
to upholding a sacred oath to preserve and enhance life?

So how on Earth, in the Land of Enchantment in the year 2001, is the New
Mexico Board of Medical Examiners, by many accounts, threatening to inflict
pain, instead of assisting those charged with relieving it?

The board on June 20 is tentatively scheduled to hear the case of Dr. Joan
Lewis, an Albuquerque physician who specializes in pain treatment and who
faces board charges of prescribing controlled substances, such as
narcotics, "in quantities that exceed what was medically indicated."

Lewis uses large quantities of pain relievers to accomplish her task:
reducing or eliminating pain so that her patients are not overwhelmed with
it and may return to a functional life.

Despite conducting an open practice in which she has followed and tested a
formula for severe pain management - which aims to provide relief while
avoiding addiction - and inviting peer oversight, Lewis now faces potential
suspension or revocation of her New Mexico medical license.

Aside from the professionally devastating impact this would have on her,
her patients are horrified at the thought of losing the one medical
professional who listened to them and who seeks to make a difference in
their lives.

The board's charges apparently are based on six of Lewis' pain patients,
four of whom actually have come to Lewis' defense in legal briefs filed on
her behalf in opposition to the state board.

Lewis frankly protests, in Monday's illuminating package of articles, "Pain
Relief on Trial" by The Albuquerque Tribune's Business Editor Sherry
Robinson, that she has "no idea what I'm accused of."

The board's evidence appears to be sketchy, contested and highly
questionable. In contrast, public statements of support, quoted in
Robinson's report, come from fellow doctors, lawyers, legislators,
representatives of various national pain organizations and University of
New Mexico Health Sciences Center experts - not to mention Lewis' own
patients. Her support is overwhelming.

To peers who have examined her program, she is considered nothing short of
a medical pioneer. To her patients and their families - who collectively
have felt abandoned, slandered or impugned as "junkies" or sinners by
traditional practitioners - Lewis is a savior. If these testimonials are to
be believed, Lewis shouldn't be pilloried by the state board; she should be
canonized.

Registered Nurse Dorothy Hughes, who feared addiction, says, "Dr. Lewis
literally saved my sanity. Living with constant pain is a miserable way to
live.

"(Now) I am able to care for my husband," she says. "I sew, quilt, enjoy my
friends and drive my car."

Retired UNM faculty member David Stratman says he suffers not only from
intense pain but from the "humiliation in pleading for relief" from
conventional doctors. Lewis, he says, "is the first physician in this state
to be truly interested in the quality of my life."

So dramatic is the praise from so many quarters that we are moved to
question the motives of the state board, its investigators and the staff
from the Attorney General's Office. Certainly, part of their charge is to
protect patients from physician abuse, but what is the basis of this action
against a doctor whose crime seems to be that she listens to and tries to
find a way to help patients whose pleas otherwise have largely been ignored?

Collectively, these state officials also fly in the face of a changed and
stiff head wind in the form of the New Mexico Pain Relief Act of 1999. It
empowers New Mexico physicians to prescribe adequate pain relief for
patients suffering extreme pain.

In fact, if the state Board of Examiners - which incidentally was the
single professional opponent to the Pain Relief Act - persists with this
drug witch-hunt, then it and how it operates are what need to be examined.

Need we remind the board that the first principle of medicine is "Do no
harm"? If, through this case, they intimidate physicians into cowering in
the face of their patients' insufferable pain, then the board not only acts
as, but in fact becomes, the instrument of hurt.

Is this proper medical oversight? Or is it persecution of someone willing
to chart unconventional, and perhaps socially unpopular, territory to help
people cope with the disabling, despairing terror of pain?

Do its members think that Dr. Lewis is in the business of addicting people,
or of returning to them a bearable life?

Is the state board concerned with the best medical practice here, or the
politically correct thing to do in a society that seems, frankly, obsessed
with drugs?

Is there no limit to our pharmacophobia?

Is our fear of drug abuse so rabid that, to regulate controlled substances,
even in the hands of the greatest humanitarians among us - our doctors - we
would unnecessarily bind their hands and prevent them from soothing the
most tormented among us with a reasoned, medically sound and scientifically
successful pain management regime?

Even if Dr. Lewis' techniques proved to be miserable failures, have we
become so captive to concerns about the evils of drugs and addiction that
we would prefer to see people - even the terminally ill - suffer rather
than explore an approach that might make a difference for some between
wanting to live and preferring to die?

What kind of animals are we?