Dear Patients:

Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking with a prominent pain specialist from Illinois. He is very involved in the politics that surround our specialty and affect our patients. I asked him this one simple question: should patients contact our state’s health insurance oversight organization to share the specifics of what is happening to their access to pain management? His answer was just as straight forward. ABSOLUTELY! As physicians treating pain, we have no pull and no power. None. Lots of reasons why this is, but it is pointless to rattle them off here. What really matters is that YOU, as patients and as voting members of the public, have pull and power. Are you willing to step up on your own behalves? I’d hope so.

In our state, it is DIFS, the Department of Insurance and Financial Services, who oversees health insurance. You can find them on-line at DIFS. They have an email portal, but also a physical address. I still believe in the power of the written word, and I still believe that a person to person phone call carries more weight than an email. Please, take the time to speak up. Tell them what has happened to your care over the past few years. I know that many, many of you did very well back in the days when I could treat you every 8 weeks. I know that many, many of you did very well back in the days when I could treat different parts of your spine all together at one visit, or could to the same very necessary, critical procedure based upon what YOU needed, and not based upon rules designed to restrict and limit treatment. Share your story. Explain as if you are speaking to someone who knows nothing about chronic pain exactly what going an extra 4 or 8 weeks between treatments does to your life. You’re the only one with this power. Sadly, when it comes to insurance, I’ve been stripped of mine.

Don’t forget your elected state government officers, ie., your representatives and your senators. These people depend upon your vote to keep their jobs. Believe me, it is in their own best interests to respond to you. But if they don’t even know about the problem, they cannot help. Educate them.
I don’t know if other specialists are finding their abilities to treat patients reduced and restricted, but my suspicion is that patients with chronic pain are being targeted. I hope I’m wrong here, but I have a bad feeling about it. So many of you have told me about how things have changed over the past few years. About how you are made to feel like drug addicts in the emergency rooms. About how previously friendly pharmacists you’ve known for years have started to treat you differently. About how your other physicians can’t even let you get three sentences out before interrupting to tell you that you’ll have to see your pain specialist for medication, even when you had no intention of asking them for anything. About how every time you are hospitalized, you are lectured on the evils of the opioids you take. Lectured, I might add, by people who have nothing else to offer you for pain relief. It goes on and on, and I can’t make this stuff up.

I’m here to cheer you on, but I can’t do much more than that. You have to do this for yourselves.

Thomas M Basch, MD