Doctor won't prescribe any more pain medicine.

I have a herniated L5 disc that causes pain in my back, butt, leg, and groin. I had been taking percocet 10/650 twice a day when I had to switch doctors because of a change in insurance. I was told by the new doctor that she does not prescribe percocet but would for me until I got into PM. My initial PM appointment is at the end of November. I thought this would be fine and I have been getting a months supply of the pills at a time for 3 months with the new doctor. I called Monday to get a refill as it has been a month and I was running out. I called Wednesday because I had not heard back from them. I was told that the doctor was reviewing my records and they would get back to me. I finally get a call back today near the close of business from a secretary that tells me the doctor won't prescribe me any more percocet and that I need to see a pain management doctor. She wouldn't even offer something as an alternative. I feel like they think I'm a drug addict or something. I'm not sure what to do now for my pain since I ran out of the percocets on Tuesday. I have an appointment tomorrow with a neurosurgeon who has already told me he doesn't want to operate on my back. He sent me out for nerve tests and additional mri's.

[Iloverusty]

I'm sorry you are having to go through this.  Are you going through withdrawals and pain right now?  Now you said that you don't see a pain specialist until November?  If that is true you can find other pain specialists that will see you much sooner.  Go through the list of pain specialists listed by your insurance provider (if you have one).  If you don't, google pain specialists on the computer in your area.  As soon as you find one that can see you right away call your doctor and have them refer you (letter) by fax or e-mail.  I found a pain specialist with American Pain and Wellness (Dallas TX) and they got me in the next day.  That is not right of your doctor to get you started and then just take you off of it suddenly. Maybe she is not aware of the side effects when the medication is stopped suddenly.  Good luck!

[Quincunx]

I think your doctor is guilty of medical crimes against humanity.  I'm am so damn sick of doctors either not giving a ****, rationalizing their decision on the simple fact that you know a lot about your illness and this is taught in med school as "drug seeking behavior", or wussing out to the DEA (an agency that seems to have physically and psychologically harmed more ill people with their INSANE "drug addiction is a moral issue" falsosiphy than the Nazis ever dreamed of, or basically not even caring because he/she once did a rotation in the ER/Cancer ward/Burn Unit and if you are not screaming in horror and shock, your pain is somewhere below level 23 and therefore tylenol and maybe darvocet (on your fourth or fifth appoinment) would be the most beneficial course of treatment to you, the patient.  I have been sick for 18 years with an extremely painful illness and have seen over 200 MD, DO's, specialists, clinics, you name it.  I have heard every GD'd excuse in the book from these "first do no harm" jackasses that see Albert Sweitzer in the mirror every morning after waking up feeling great and ready to go.  The lowest point for me (for a while I planned on killing the MD and then myself) came when my doctor flat out told me he could not give me narcotic pain medications under any circumstances.  This was after I tested positive for five different autoimmune anitbodies and my rheumatoid factor was off the chart.  When I asked him why he said, and I quote "Well, that's what the doctor's did for Elizabeth Taylor and she ended up suing them."  Three months later I was deemed to be clinically insane from pain, or lack of treatment thereof, and found an MD who basically saved my life by treating my pain, simply because I said I was in pain.  It was the same with only one other doctor.  What did these two MD's have in common that the other 198 did not?  MD number one had broken his lower spine in a stairfall and still suffered somewhat to this day, and the other (a very wise woman) had contracted a blood tumor over the roof of her mouth that ate away almost all over her nose and much of the surrounding tissue when she was a littlle girl.  These two people actually KNEW that PAIN HURTS and chronic pain will make you insane without treatment.  As for the rest, I can only hope there is a special place in medical Hell for these Josef Mengeles.  I see NO difference whatsoever between causing someone severe pain through the inflliction of torture and the withholding of morphine from a patient who is writing in agony two feet away from you.  In fact, the second case I view with extreme hatred and venomous fury, because one, it takes a very sick and twisted person to torture someone, especially in a medical manner as Mengeles, but to not ever rise to the occasion of picking up a pad (script) and pen and writing something out in under thirty seconds that will stop someone who is suffering in extreme pain, we'll they are medically negligent now in most states and I would try them under the Geneva convention as well as I regard those of us in chronic pain as prisoners of our own bodies, and they are the keepers of the jail, as they have the prescripted KEYS to the pharmacies where the state and federal laws in their infinite wisdom continue to confine medicinal reliefs from anyone and everyone who is in need and a) can'tt afford medical insurance, b) can't afford prescription insurance, c) can't afford not to get out of pain, or d) doesn't LUCK OUT on the first try and get an MD that didn't graduate from University of Insanity Medical College.  Shakespeare wanted to kill all the lawyers, and I think it might me a good idea to subject all prospective MD grads to simulated extreme pain for a lengthy period of time to they can just perceive the slightest vestige of a trace of a taste of what chronic severe pain is like and can do to your mind and body and soul after eighteen years.  This is just as they do in the military for Special forces units, only they spend long period of time undergoing "simulated torture".  Maybe that is why so few of the are ever captured or leave a fellow soldier behind.  If doctors continue to inflict severe pain on patients through INACTION (which believe me is ofter the worst form of ACTION that can be taken), then I think that maybe someday somebody crazed enough in pain is going to start taking out the ones that commit the atrocity of not taking a patients pain seriously just like the antiabortionists do.  Worse, the law allows for doctors to perform abortions!, but few states have anything on the books that says a human being has the right to be as pain free as possible.  Lastly I'll leave off with this.  Our justice system was predicated on the ideal that it is better to have 1,000 guilty men walking the street than to have 1 innocent man in jail.  I don't see why the medical community can't have the same philosphy towards we who suffer.  I personally would rather have 1,000 drug addicts getting there drugs in a legal manner (like they now all do in England, Germany, Amsterdam, and a few more), and have them sitting at home watching TV while smoking crack (which is provided by pharmacies in Western Europe with a doctor's prescription) and endangering no one, and not even needing to BECOME a criminal to buy there stuff, than to have a single person suffer relentless pain because MD's are insanely afraid of causing addiction (which only happens to 1 out of every 1,000 long term morphine patients in reality!).  This country's medical, political and judicial need to link hands and pull all as one out of the puritanical hyteria of the temperance movement (which gave rise to that lovely organization called the mafia) and ground themselves in economic, hygienic, rational and most of all to people addicted and people in pain alike, MERCIFUL - reality of the world today and not the one founded in Jonestown at plymouth rock or the nutcases that preach  and promote "drug and sex abstinence" as something other than overzelously insane and completely ungrounded in reality and seen by anyone who has experienced more than an hour it what is called the REAL world as off-world or alienlike, will end up somehow getting control of the mic again and pretty soon the ninety percent of US citizens that don't vote are going to be looking funny when they are told they have terminal cancer and are handed a bottle of aspirin and a booklet on the danger of addiction (number one being of course, unplanned pregnancies.)  Wakd up all you MD's who seem to have made their tuition money by subbing for guards at Treblinka, get off your hypocratic oath and instead of "First do no harm" - Secondly, "Stop any harm that is occuring in any way possible".  And pain is one of the ******* easiest thngs to treat.  Its a drug that is made from a flower called papifer somnivar and there are hundreds of thousands of acres devoted to its cultivation wordwide, and that has been going on for millenia.  Or else it will be "Thirdly - congress might pass a law like they did with "nutriional supplements" and simple folks like THE ENTIRE WORLD will not have to come begging to the medical master anymore whining in pain for relief hoping not once again to be mentally raped when you turn and smile at me and say, "I'm sorry, but I don't do pain) and decide that people can pretty much treat themselves with meds when they are ill by talking to other people who have had the same problem and gee whiz, why don't we save a ton of money on our 5 trillion dollar debt anhd turn all the pharmacies into superstores.  In fact, when I become president I promise to desigate a special part of the country to those in chronic pain and establish a city there where a Jetliner sprays morphine and cocaine overhead at thirty thousand feet ten times a day over the city's mainstay, Central Relief Park.  Those who don't want to "parky" can stay the **** home and those who decided they would rather tough out the pain can get bent.  

PS.  As a personaly message to pain clinics everywhere - F*CK You and the horse....  That includes this Cleveland outhouse believe me, cause after you've been to five or six, well, I don't think cleveland is the place pain will start to be taken as seriously as well, Rock and Roll.

PSS.  To the person who started this discussion you have my deepest sympathies and hopes for a better future physically and physicianally.  Personally, I am beginng to believe it when MAO said "power grows out of the barrel of a gun" ..  perhaps all of us who suffer would be better off with a saying of our own "An MD in pain becomes a DOCTOR again."

[Quincunx]

I think your doctor is guilty of medical crimes against humanity.  I'm am so damn sick of doctors either not giving a ****, rationalizing their decision on the simple fact that you know a lot about your illness and this is taught in med school as "drug seeking behavior", or wussing out to the DEA (an agency that seems to have physically and psychologically harmed more ill people with their INSANE "drug addiction is a moral issue" falsosiphy than the Nazis ever dreamed of, or basically not even caring because he/she once did a rotation in the ER/Cancer ward/Burn Unit and if you are not screaming in horror and shock, your pain is somewhere below level 23 and therefore tylenol and maybe darvocet (on your fourth or fifth appoinment) would be the most beneficial course of treatment to you, the patient.  I have been sick for 18 years with an extremely painful illness and have seen over 200 MD, DO's, specialists, clinics, you name it.  I have heard every GD'd excuse in the book from these "first do no harm" jackasses that see Albert Sweitzer in the mirror every morning after waking up feeling great and ready to go.  The lowest point for me (for a while I planned on killing the MD and then myself) came when my doctor flat out told me he could not give me narcotic pain medications under any circumstances.  This was after I tested positive for five different autoimmune anitbodies and my rheumatoid factor was off the chart.  When I asked him why he said, and I quote "Well, that's what the doctor's did for Elizabeth Taylor and she ended up suing them."  Three months later I was deemed to be clinically insane from pain, or lack of treatment thereof, and found an MD who basically saved my life by treating my pain, simply because I said I was in pain.  It was the same with only one other doctor.  What did these two MD's have in common that the other 198 did not?  MD number one had broken his lower spine in a stairfall and still suffered somewhat to this day, and the other (a very wise woman) had contracted a blood tumor over the roof of her mouth that ate away almost all over her nose and much of the surrounding tissue when she was a littlle girl.  These two people actually KNEW that PAIN HURTS and chronic pain will make you insane without treatment.  As for the rest, I can only hope there is a special place in medical Hell for these Josef Mengeles.  I see NO difference whatsoever between causing someone severe pain through the inflliction of torture and the withholding of morphine from a patient who is writing in agony two feet away from you.  In fact, the second case I view with extreme hatred and venomous fury, because one, it takes a very sick and twisted person to torture someone, especially in a medical manner as Mengeles, but to not ever rise to the occasion of picking up a pad (script) and pen and writing something out in under thirty seconds that will stop someone who is suffering in extreme pain, we'll they are medically negligent now in most states and I would try them under the Geneva convention as well as I regard those of us in chronic pain as prisoners of our own bodies, and they are the keepers of the jail, as they have the prescripted KEYS to the pharmacies where the state and federal laws in their infinite wisdom continue to confine medicinal reliefs from anyone and everyone who is in need and a) can'tt afford medical insurance, b) can't afford prescription insurance, c) can't afford not to get out of pain, or d) doesn't LUCK OUT on the first try and get an MD that didn't graduate from University of Insanity Medical College.  Shakespeare wanted to kill all the lawyers, and I think it might me a good idea to subject all prospective MD grads to simulated extreme pain for a lengthy period of time to they can just perceive the slightest vestige of a trace of a taste of what chronic severe pain is like and can do to your mind and body and soul after eighteen years.  This is just as they do in the military for Special forces units, only they spend long period of time undergoing "simulated torture".  Maybe that is why so few of the are ever captured or leave a fellow soldier behind.  If doctors continue to inflict severe pain on patients through INACTION (which believe me is ofter the worst form of ACTION that can be taken), then I think that maybe someday somebody crazed enough in pain is going to start taking out the ones that commit the atrocity of not taking a patients pain seriously just like the antiabortionists do.  Worse, the law allows for doctors to perform abortions!, but few states have anything on the books that says a human being has the right to be as pain free as possible.  Lastly I'll leave off with this.  Our justice system was predicated on the ideal that it is better to have 1,000 guilty men walking the street than to have 1 innocent man in jail.  I don't see why the medical community can't have the same philosphy towards we who suffer.  I personally would rather have 1,000 drug addicts getting there drugs in a legal manner (like they now all do in England, Germany, Amsterdam, and a few more), and have them sitting at home watching TV while smoking crack (which is provided by pharmacies in Western Europe with a doctor's prescription) and endangering no one, and not even needing to BECOME a criminal to buy there stuff, than to have a single person suffer relentless pain because MD's are insanely afraid of causing addiction (which only happens to 1 out of every 1,000 long term morphine patients in reality!).  This country's medical, political and judicial need to link hands and pull all as one out of the puritanical hyteria of the temperance movement (which gave rise to that lovely organization called the mafia) and ground themselves in economic, hygienic, rational and most of all to people addicted and people in pain alike, MERCIFUL - reality of the world today and not the one founded in Jonestown at plymouth rock or the nutcases that preach  and promote "drug and sex abstinence" as something other than overzelously insane and completely ungrounded in reality and seen by anyone who has experienced more than an hour it what is called the REAL world as off-world or alienlike, will end up somehow getting control of the mic again and pretty soon the ninety percent of US citizens that don't vote are going to be looking funny when they are told they have terminal cancer and are handed a bottle of aspirin and a booklet on the danger of addiction (number one being of course, unplanned pregnancies.)  Wakd up all you MD's who seem to have made their tuition money by subbing for guards at Treblinka, get off your hypocratic oath and instead of "First do no harm" - Secondly, "Stop any harm that is occuring in any way possible".  And pain is one of the ******* easiest thngs to treat.  Its a drug that is made from a flower called papifer somnivar and there are hundreds of thousands of acres devoted to its cultivation wordwide, and that has been going on for millenia.  Or else it will be "Thirdly - congress might pass a law like they did with "nutriional supplements" and simple folks like THE ENTIRE WORLD will not have to come begging to the medical master anymore whining in pain for relief hoping not once again to be mentally raped when you turn and smile at me and say, "I'm sorry, but I don't do pain) and decide that people can pretty much treat themselves with meds when they are ill by talking to other people who have had the same problem and gee whiz, why don't we save a ton of money on our 5 trillion dollar debt anhd turn all the pharmacies into superstores.  In fact, when I become president I promise to desigate a special part of the country to those in chronic pain and establish a city there where a Jetliner sprays morphine and cocaine overhead at thirty thousand feet ten times a day over the city's mainstay, Central Relief Park.  Those who don't want to "parky" can stay the **** home and those who decided they would rather tough out the pain can get bent.  

PS.  As a personaly message to pain clinics everywhere - F*CK You and the horse....  That includes this Cleveland outhouse believe me, cause after you've been to five or six, well, I don't think cleveland is the place pain will start to be taken as seriously as well, Rock and Roll.

PSS.  To the person who started this discussion you have my deepest sympathies and hopes for a better future physically and physicianally.  Personally, I am beginng to believe it when MAO said "power grows out of the barrel of a gun" ..  perhaps all of us who suffer would be better off with a saying of our own "An MD in pain becomes a DOCTOR again."

[corinaloo]

I have had a broken bone and they would not prescribe anything, saying to just take lots of tylenol and ibuprofen. I had a very bad back injury from a car accident and a broken tailbone, and one doctor told me that if I took NSAIDs again I would aggrevate my stomach ulcer (I was taking a lot of Advil and Aleve for my back)- which he said almost required hospitalization (the ulcer was really bad). I have seen doctors a couple times. One was very rude, and said she didn't care if I was in pain, and that even though I had a stomach ulcer, to just take anti infammatories anyway. Very degrading experience. I guess I will just have to deal with the pain.

[Sarajmt]

Hi Corina:  I am so sorry to hear of your pain.  This is a very old post.  I'd suggest you copy and paste your post into a new thread.  You'd get many more responses.

I'd like to welcome you our forum.  We're not doctors but chronic pain patients. We support and advise one another using our own experiences.  My advice to you is to see a pain management physician.  Have your primary physician refer you to one.  They can use different procedures and pain medications that other doctor either cannot or will not do.

Good luck and please start a new thread on this.

Sara

[CaoMoo]

One thing I would only suggest, call the pain management Dr. and see if they have any cancellations. If they do ask them to move you up. If the appointment is still far off, wait a week, or at least a few days, call them back and repeat the process. I have sometimes managed to call and find that they have an appointment available for the day I called. It is different worth a try.

[helpseeking]

I have very bad migranes (migraines) and have been seeing the same neuro doc for about 3 years. He gives me 20 hydros and stadol for pain. I also do the imetrx injections; maxalt, zonagran for preventive. I have been having terrible pain in my arms at night and didnt know what it was so I would take some of my pain meds to help. I went to my family doctor for the arm pain and they think i have fibromiagia. So she put me on gabapentin and gave me 20 hydros because i told her that I had been taking my headache pain medicine to help me out and now i was out. Well in the mean time, I also take tramodol for cramps which I was also taking to help with my arm pain at the time. Well my insurance contacted my headache doctor (neuro) and showed him where I got pain meds from other doctors other than him now he won't refill my meds untill he see me again because something about I can't get pain med from more that one doctor. Does anyone know whats going on with this.