Fed: "fear of opiates" leaving people in pain

AAP General News (Australia)
04-09-2001
Fed: "fear of opiates" leaving people in pain

By Rada Rouse, National Medical Correspondent

BRISBANE, April 9 AAP - People suffering pain are lying to get on methadone programs
and "doctor shopping" in a desperate bid to get relief, a physician said today.

The stigma surrounding opiate use may be leaving up to one million Australians with
inadequately treated pain, Dr Ian Buttfield said.

Dr Buttfield, a senior specialist physician with the Drug and Alcohol Services Council
of South Australia, said doctors were too scared of regulatory authorities to prescribe
pain-killers like morphine.

"Ordinary citizens who might have osteoarthritis of the knee or back pain are not getting
treated," Dr Buttfield said.

Speaking from the Australian Pain Society conference in Cairns, Dr Buttfield said people
would rather put up with back pain than take morphine because they hated being stigmatised
as a potential "drug addict".

Doctor shopping was not merely about drug-seeking to obtain a "high" because Australian
research showed that up to 70 per cent involved have an illness, including physical or
psychologically-based pain, he said.

Dr Buttfield said surveys in New York had revealed that a significant proportion of
people seeking to go on methadone programs were not heroin addicts but ordinary people
seeking pain relief.

"There are people going into methadone programs who lie about heroin use to get on
them, and I've certainly seen that in this country," he said.

Dr Buttfield said a huge number of Australians were not receiving adequate pain treatment
because of a culture condemning opiate use.

"There's a fear among doctors of prescribing morphine-like drugs because of the pressure
from the Health Insurance Commission, state health regulators and medicals boards looking
over their shoulders," he said.

"This fear is fed by the community's perception that anyone who has these drugs is
going to be an addict, but this is wrong."

The true incidence of abuse of opiates prescribed as painkillers was estimated at five
to 10 per cent, he said.

Dr Buttfield said the phobia about opiate prescribing led to wide use of strong painkilling
drugs containing codeine, which was addictive, and paracetamol which damaged the liver
if used every day for long periods.

Pain clinics around Australia had long waiting lists because of general practitioners'
reluctance to prescribe.

"The treatment of non-malignant pain which is disabling is a growing international
problem," Dr Buttfield said.

"Pain is increasing in an ageing society, with more people suffering back pain and
arthritis, and more people surviving major trauma who would otherwise have died - they
need a lot of morphine."

Dr Buttfield said around 10 million Americans were undertreated for pain, and extrapolating
from that, he believed there would be around one million Australians similarly suffering.

AAP rr/sc/cjh/de e

KEYWORD: PAIN

2001 AAP Information Services Pty Limited (AAP) or its Licensors.