For Alison Satake, Ryan D'Souza, and the Hospital Board at Mayo Clinic:
A colleague recently referred me to the following article on the Mayo Clinic website:
https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/who-is-most-at-risk-for-opioid-use/
I write to propose that neither of you authors - or the Hospital Board at Mayo - can possibly understand the clinical literature of chronic pain management. Your respective organizations are promoting the outright fraudulent mythology that clinical treatment of pain employing opioids entails a high immediate risk of opioid addiction or mortality. Both assertions are not only untrue but fraudulent. Published demographic data for millions of patients over the past 40 years prove this reality beyond any rational contradiction.
I am taking the liberty of sharing this correspondence with senior officials at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the US FDA, as well as to news media and a BCC mailing list of over 70 practicing clinicians and patient advocates. My colleagues and I have briefed multiple Agency officials on the realities of the US opioid crisis. Several of us have published extensively as authors or coauthors in this field over the past 40 years.
Most of my individual work is rigorously peer-reviewed before submission. You can easily assess my qualifications as a subject matter expert in this field by searching Google Scholar.
I am forwarding for your consideration a deeply referenced 4,000-word paper titled "An Indictment of US Public Health Policy For Pain Management". The paper is now under final editorial review at a respected clinical journal and will be published in November. Key points fully supported in the paper include:
- Incidence of substance abuse or overdose in clinically managed pain patients treated with opioids in an ongoing doctor-patient relationship is almost certainly less than one in a thousand patients. This incidence falls within the range of known confounds on the accuracy of diagnosis.
- On the rare occasions when pain patients do develop substance abuse, the primary factors that predict risk are related to identifiable mental health issues in patient records — not prescription of opioids.
- 40+ years of CDC mortality data reveal that prescription opioids have never been a dominant factor in the widely touted US "opioid crisis" and are not now.
- All of the realities above were known to the authors and approving officials of the US CDC and Veterans Administration 2022 opioid prescribing guidelines — BEFORE publication of their fatally flawed and politically-driven guidelines.
This paper as published will be announced to a potential audience of two million medical industry contributors: doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and mental health change agents.
If you as individuals or the organizations that publish your work wish to avoid being buried by a wave of protest over your advocacy of mythologies that are killing people, then I strongly advise that you convene panels of clinical experts to receive presentations from my colleagues and I, and then deliberate on how best to extricate yourselves from your past errors and misdirection.
We are available to support your review and revision of Mayo policy, and we can call upon thousands of other clinically qualified experts to do so. So it is time for you folks to get moving in changed directions or get out of Dodge!
WE ARE A NATION IN PAIN AND WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED!
