By Pat Anson, Editor

Human Rights Watch is well-known internationally for its groundbreaking reports on human rights violations around the world. The organization has recently reported on the torture of prisoners in Sri Lanka, forced labor in Thailand, and corruption and mass arrests in Saudi Arabia.

Pain News Network has learned the New York-based non-profit is turning its attention closer to home – by launching an investigation into the treatment of chronic pain patients in the United States. The impetus for the investigation began when researchers were studying the treatment of cancer and palliative care patients – and began to see poorly treated pain as a human rights issue.

“People we interviewed who didn’t have access to appropriate medications for their pain were essentially giving testimony that was almost exactly the same as the testimony we were getting from the victims of police torture,” says Diederik Lohman, Director of Health and Human Rights for Human Rights Watch.

“And we realized this was actually one of those issues that almost no one was paying attention to. People were facing tremendous suffering that actually could be relieved pretty easily through very inexpensive palliative care and pain management.”
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In many third world countries, Lohman says opioid pain medications like morphine are difficult to obtain, even for patients dying of cancer.

“They would say the pain was just unbearable, that they would do anything to make it stop, and many of them would tell us that they asked their doctors to give them something to put them out of their misery,” he told PNN.

Recently those same stories have been coming from pain patients in the United States.

“As we started looking at this issue more closely, we started hearing more and more stories of chronic pain patients in the U.S. who had been on opioids, who were being told by their physicians that we have to take you off. And we started hearing stories of patients who were having a lot of trouble finding a doctor who’s willing to accept them as a patient,” said Lohman.

Lohman says Human Rights Watch is well aware of the addiction and overdose crisis in the U.S. But he says the “right balance” needs to be found between keeping opioids off the street and making sure medications are still available to legitimate patients.

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https://www.painnewsnetwork.org/stories/2018/3/15/human-rights-watch-investigating-treatment-of-pain-patients