CANCER PATIENTS DENIED NEEDED PAIN TREATMENT

Patients Deserve Pain-Free Dignity

I practiced medicine for more than 40 years and oncology for more
than 30. I can remember patients literally screaming from pain all
the way to death. Based on my experience, effective pain management
has been the most important achievement of medical care in the last 30 years.

Dr. Kathy Foley, who spearheaded this effort, is a Catholic
neurologist who works at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. She
has devoted her professional life, supported and inspired by her
faith, to bringing back a human dimension (the patient perspective)
to an increasingly technological type of medicine.

Effective pain management has been the first and essential step
toward helping the patients and their loved ones to treasure the last
days of life, to face the awesome mystery of death without fear of
physical discomfort. These remarkable advances risk being erased by
the grandstanding and cynicism of some Bible-thumping politicians.
They have promoted a law that will make it more difficult for pain
patients to access the proper medication and harder for physicians to
practice compassionate, patient-centered medicine.

Given that the loss of every single human life is a tragedy, the
prevention of an occasional overdose death is not a good reason to
interfere with the relief of the suffering of millions of people. The
same politicians who promise to take the government off your back
want to use the government to deprive dying individuals of a
dignified, pain-free death.

Lodovico Balducci, Tampa