A Call to Action for Pain Patients and Advocates

The Pain Community Must Engage!  I Have Goosebumps!

Engagement

We have until Dec 4th to submit professional (avoiding emotions and expletives) comments on the DEA’s proposed 2024 controlled substances production quota cuts.  In my opinion, we need 100K or more on-point comments to be impactful.  With 20 to 40 million pain patients, not counting friends and family members, achieving 100K should be easily achievable.  We are only talking 0.5 to 1.0% of the pain patient population alone, in order to achieve 100K.

Our comments must be focused on the proposed production quota cuts.   Cite the shortages you are already experiencing on pharmacy shelves to support your request that the DEA increase their opioid production quotas, NOT cut them further!  Your personal account of how current medication shortages on pharmacy shelves have negatively impacted you, or those you care about, is the message that MUST be conveyed in your comment!  Please check out the “Commentor’s Checklist” which is available directly under “Write a Comment” at this link provided to submit your comment:  Regulations.gov

Goosebumps

To further prompt your engagement, I share with you a personal motivational favorite in which I see many analogies to the pain community.  Listening to it recharges my batteries in our collective fight on behalf of chronic pain patients.  It is a timeless classic written by Paul Simon, and originally made famous by Simon and Garfunkel in the 1967 movie (also a favorite of mine), The Graduate.  This amazing version was produced by the heavy metal band Disturbed.  The classically trained voice of David Draiman will give you chills!  I have viewed/listened to it countless times and still get goosebumps!

Here is the YouTube link followed by my “interpretations”.  Watch it on a large screen if at all possible.  Read the words as they are being sung.  Crank up the volume.  You will get “goosebumps”.

Disturbed – The Sound Of Silence [Official Music Video] – YouTube

 My Interpretations of THE SOUND OF SILENCE

Written about songwriters, performers, and the tv set (“neon God”), I associate it to:

– the all to comfortable lack of effective action by too many pain patients and physicians, “Hello darkness my old friend”

– our suffering and trials, feelings of abandonment, “In restless dreams I walked alone”

– our pain, “When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light”

– the masses of chronic pain patients, “Ten thousand people, maybe more”

– the lack of effective involvement by pain patients, “people talking without speaking”

– our elected representatives, “people hearing without listening”.

–  self advocacy guidance not being acted upon by many pain patients, “People writing songs that voices never shared”

– pain patients’ reluctance to engage, “And no one dared disturb the sound of silence”

– Pain patient’s lack of engagement permitting greater suffering, “Fools” said I, you do not know, silence like a cancer grows”

– the ignoring of the extraordinary efforts of pain patient advocates, “Hear my words that I might teach you. Take my arms that I might reach you. But my words, like silent raindrops fell and echoed in the wells of silence”

– literally everyone not effected by the ongoing assault on pain medications believing the sensationalized misinformation promulgated on the nightly news, “And the people bowed and prayed to the neon god they made”

– are CPPs starting to engage?, “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls and whispered in the sound of silence.”

Spoiler alert: At the end of the video the boat filled with musicians are reaching the masses across the water.    That is a good sign!