EASING THEIR PAIN

Usually, when science and technology move ahead of culture and wisdom, the
general belief is that it is science that is moving too quickly, not
culture that is moving too slowly. In areas from nuclear power to genetic
engineering, the often justified fear is that we have let the genie out of
the bottle -- or Godzilla out of the deep -- and don't know how to control it.

But when it comes to the science and the culture of medicine, it seems
clear that our feelings have been far too slow to catch up with our
technology.

Last Acts, a national organization that works to improve medical treatment
for people with terminal illness, released a report this week that gives
Utah some poor grades for its willingness to use the available means to
treat severe pain and other maladies that come at the end of life.

Not that the rest of the country did much better. Last Acts noted that a
woefully small number of the people who could benefit from the services of
a hospice -- a provider of services to the terminally ill -- don't receive
them, and those who wish to die comfortably at home instead pass their
final hours in an expensive hospital. And this happens even to people whose
insurance or Medicare would have paid for such services if only the correct
paperwork had been filed.

Too many dying people suffer from pain that could be treated with a new
generation of medications. Even though the number of specialists in pain
management has grown, and even though they have developed ways of easing
intractable pain without making patients dopey, depressed or addicted, many
doctors are afraid to use such drugs and many patients or their families
are afraid to ask for them.

The cloud hanging over all good means of easing people's pain is the
misbegotten War on Drugs, a law enforcement juggernaut that has put fear of
chemicals ahead of basic human compassion. It is not necessary to embrace
such controversial proposals as medical marijuana to see that the threat of
being second-guessed by the FBI is going to put a chill into any doctor,
hospital or insurance carrier who might otherwise put the needs of patients
first.

Doctors who don't specialize in pain management or end-of-life care can be
too easily frightened by one of those letters from state or federal
agencies, the ones that take official note of the number of painkillers a
doctor prescribes and suggest that it may be too many.

It's not science that is lacking. It's wisdom.

The purpose of medicine is to ease the inevitable pain of life. Whatever
gets in the way of that, whether ignorance of available techniques or fear
of overzealous law enforcement, is not the kind of medicine that should be
practiced in a civilized society.