Chronic pain relief

Towards the end of my ministry I started to detect a civil war inside the medical community that threatened access to opioid analgesics of patients with chronic pain.

One group believed the primary goal of pain treatment was curtailing opioid prescribing while the other focused on the disability and suffering endured by the patient.

One side argued that chronic sufferers shouldn’t focus on reducing the intensity of their pain but on their emotional reactions to it. The other side believed that such views encouraged medics, pharmacists and nursing staff to treat patients with trigeminal neuralgia or dying in extremis from bone cancer as if they were addicts and criminals.

The predictable result has been patients turning to street drugs or opting for the “single ticket to Zurich” and merciful release. Far too often in my long career I sat by parishioners’ hospital beds as they lived out their last hours in agony. In scenes too harrowing to describe I longed for some kindly medic to put an end to the nightmare.

One in ten people will experience severely debilitating chronic pain at some stage but apart from opioids, treatments remain elusive.

However, researchers in University College London have identified a rare gene mutation lowering sensitivity to pain which could replace the opioids.

Now that would be worthy of a Nobel Prize! (REV DR) JOHN CAMERON

Howard Place, St Andrews