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Article: SCIENCE: AN END TO SUFFERING For many chronically ill people, suffering becomes a way of life - and death. Yet techniques to rescue them from pain are available. Roger Dobson asks whether the medical profession is failing those who most need their help
- Article from:
- The Independent (London, England)
- Article date:
- September 20, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 1998 The Independent - London. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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ONE OF the last and most enduring images of Dennis Potter is of
the playwright sipping morphine from a flask during his television
interview with Melvyn Bragg. By then, in the final throes of cancer,
Potter was, like a growing number of terminally ill patients, using
the opiate to help keep his unbearable pain under some kind of
control.
But for too many suffering people, pain is not so well managed.
Individuals frequently die in agony because they have been denied the
right treatment, while others live for years with chronic,
debilitating pain that could and should have been treated. Some
doctors and nurses remain reluctant to prescribe powerful doses of
opioids to patients in the spurious ...