Pubdate: Fri, 10 Jun 2011 Source: Battle Creek Enquirer (MI) Copyright: 2011 Battle Creek Enquirer Contact: http://www.battlecreekenquirer.com/customerservice/contactus.html Website: http://www.battlecreekenquirer.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1359 Author: Erick Williams, Lawyer in East Lansing, previously served as an administrative law judge presiding over medical licensing hearings. KEVORKIAN'S LEGACY INCLUDES EASING PAIN OF LIVING Few people realize how much Jack Kevorkian accomplished for people in pain. By 1990, the "drug war" had thoroughly intimidated doctors. Undercover cops, posing as patients in pain, visited doctors' offices to entice them to prescribe pain drugs. When doctors responded to those fake patients by prescribing pain drugs, they often got arrested. Prosecutors raided doctors' offices, seized patient files, singled out the charts of the most heavily-medicated patients, and prosecuted the doctors for giving out too many narcotics to those people. Law enforcement officials made careers of putting doctors in jail, and this practice had the effect of discouraging the treatment of pain. Doctors tried to resist the drug warriors and protect their suffering patients, but doctors as a group don't have much political clout, and their mild-mannered, academic style was no match for the sensational stories and the scare tactics that police and prosecutors used. By 1990 doctors were overpowered. Unable to protect their patients, and unable to change the laws, they learned to protect themselves in more anti-social ways. To stay out of trouble, they gave fewer narcotics to people in pain. Medical patients often felt abandoned. Terminal patients died in unnecessary agony. Desperate people, denied the relief of pain drugs, demanded the right to die. Some doctors quietly began helping their patients die. But it was Dr. Kevorkian's in-your-face challenge that created the political space. Kevorkian went public with techniques that were used in private. No jury would convict him; the legislature could not pass laws against him. Kevorkian kept pushing the issue, going more and more public, until much more powerful players, including the Catholic Church, decided to stop him. Catholic teachings oppose euthanasia as much as abortion. And in the political world, pro-life forces have the clout to match that of police, prosecutors and other drug war lobbyists. People who deeply understood the political situation realized that to stop Kevorkian they had to treat pain effectively. The laws that ultimately passed not only made assisted suicide illegal but also encouraged practitioners to treat pain and gave them protection when they did so. Before Kevorkian, doctors and nurses all-too-frequently were prosecuted for aggressively treating pain. After Kevorkian, those prosecutions were rare. Today when you visit a hospital, you may see a chart on the wall that encourages you to report your pain. If you are a medical patient, someone is likely to ask if you are in pain. They may ask, "How strong is your pain, on a scale of 1 to 10?" If you have pain, they will quickly bring effective drugs. That did not happen before Kevorkian. He, more than any other single person, is responsible for the new practice. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard R Smith Jr.