Your Pain, Your Rights:

Dealing with Your Physician and Your Hospital

By Mary Baluss, Esq.

Although I had concentrated on legal issues relating to pain in terminal illness, I had never even heard of RSD until I got a call from a young mother in California with the crippling syndrome. She had gone from being an athletic, employed, confident woman to one who could not care for her two-year old, couldn't work, and feared her husband was getting fed up with her inabilities and constant complaints. She was stitched to life by her innate determination, her love for her daughter and not much else. The tragic aspect of her story was that she knew, from experience, that she could get significant pain relief from a combination of fentanyl patches and breakthrough medication.

Her HMO balked at the cost of fentanyl and suggested that she was not really hurting. A physician at the clinic told her she was drug seeking. A clinic pharmacist yelled at her when she came to pick up medications and told her not to come back for "her drugs." It took an HMO appeal, a complaint to the state insurance commissioner, and filing a complaint in a local court to get her relief. A little over a year later, a re-evaluation started it all over again.

In advising her, I learned that chronic pain, just like end-of-life pain, could be safely treated with opioids, and that the barriers for adequate pain management were much higher for those with chronic pain than those with terminal illnesses. I also had begun to understand that living with severe chronic pain is as bad as dying with it-and lasts longer.

Source: American Pain Foundation