Sledge, my mother is currently the beneficiary of that compassionate use of opiates. Her doctor is brilliant, and I have fought tooth and nail to keep him as her doctor despite a manipulative and fucked up hospice and nursing home medical establishment doing all they can to undermine her doctor. My mother has suffered from chronic pain from debilitating physical disabilities for many years, but only recently began receiving compassionate, humane treatment from her care givers. The only thing that has changed is a tumor in her right lung was discovered last fall. In the US medical establishment, a patient is usually only seen as being deserving of compassion if they have an acute illness, or a terminal one. People who suffer with life-long disabilities which are not life threatening, are not treated compassionately or humanely by the US medical system, in my experience.

I also know a lot of disabled people who have suffered from chronic pain. Unfortunately, there is no compassion for them in the medical establishment, especially if the conventional wisdom is that there are behavioral causes to their pain (ie obesity, or failure to exercise or modify the diet) despite the cutting edge research that has been done by the scientific medical research community into the uses of opiates with chronic pain patients.

That research, done over two decades now, has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that chronic pain patients can benefit tremendously from long term high dosages of opiates to relieve their pain and dramatically improve their functionality and quality of life, without the addictive side effects found in people who don't suffer from chronic pain. But still, the US medical establishment is largely opposed to providing pain relief management to any chronic pain patients except those with terminal illness.

Since the Bush administration has been in office, there has been a holy war against doctors and chronic pain patients over the use of oxycontin, or "hillbilly heroin" as it is sometimes called, that was made infamous when Rush Limbaugh was outed for his addiction to it. The end result: doctors will rarely prescribe oxycontin for more than one or two refills to anyone unless they are in the end of life stage of a terminal illness. That has set the cause of chronic pain treatment back by several decades at least.

Which is why so many people who suffer tremendously from chronic pain, or recurring flare-ups of acute pain, are seeking out alternatives to alleviate their suffering. They are seeking it out because the US medical establishment, in a conspiracy with the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, refuse to treat them.

I also live in an area where there is a cluster of brain cancers in children. A friend of our family's daughter was diagnosed with a brain tumor when she was entering puberty, that is so rare it has only been seen in male adolescent descendants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors. All these children in the brain cancer cluster lived in a geographical area where their water supply was found to be contaminated with radiation, and subsequently closed down.

Miraculously or ironically (depending upon one's worldview), the world's only medical expert on those specific, rare types of brain tumors also lives and practices in this same area where the children's brain cancer cluster was found. When our family friend asked the doctor if there were any complimentary therapies he recommended to make the treatments less painful or the patient survival rate more likely, the doctor's response was quite illuminating. He said the research has only shown one factor to be statistically significant enough to note among the children who survived the cancer and went on to live normal lives: the belief of the parents that the child would be cured. He also told the father that massage therapy would provide the best relief for pain, and was especially recommended because opiates in children is a bad combination.

And before you get carried away with your self-righteousness Sledge, I am currently watching my mother suffer a pretty awful death from lung cancer. I don't need you to lecture me. While my mother has chosen not to use complimentary therapies, it doesn't mean I don't know how effective they can be for alleviating pain and human suffering. It isn't just about "the cure" as you keep insinuating Sledge. It is also about having much more compassion and empathy for people who are suffering from pain, and helping alleviate it, rather than condemn them as whiners and junkies the way that the US medical establishment does.

I have known a number of life threatening disease survivors in my life, and a number of people who have succumbed to them. Including AIDS. And heart disease. And diabetes. And COPD. And cancer. I have seen the patients suffering with these diseases treated with compassion and respect (not to mention, pain relieving drugs without judgment and derision).

And I have also seen the physical life-long suffering of people with painful disabilities, contemptuously dismissed and/or demonized by the medical establishment as whiners and junkies, who are just looking to milk the system or get their next narcotic fix. I find that double standard of so-called "compassionate care" appalling.