Media
Feb 10, 2021
A recent study conducted by the University of British Columbia upholds everything that CPAC has been saying about the prescribing changes made by Health Canada to ostensibly reduce overdose deaths.
Dec 9, 2020
We finally hear back on our FOI request: even the science the government defends says NO to pain prescription cutbacks.
True or false? Doctors triggered our overdose crisis...
November 2 2020
Second verse, same as the first. Just a little bit longer—and a whole lot worse.
The second report of Health Canada's Canadian Pain Task Force, just out, runs to 75 pages, yet fails once again to speak to the two million among us suffering serious chronic pain, or to the six million struggling with lasting pain that’s a little less severe. As usual, these eight million unfortunates—one in four adult Canadians—can’t look to government for help.
November 2 2020
While the American Medical Association has rebuked the CDC guideline and the crackdown on Americans in pain, the CMA hasn't made a peep on behalf of deprescribed Canadians.
They replied by dusting off and sending us their
five-year-old policy titled "Harms associated with opioids and other psychoactive prescription drugs...." Its every reference but one is at least ten years old.
We can't believe it either. So we wrote them back to say so.
October 2020
Mr. Martin Walterson is a chronic pain patient who has had his health and life destroyed by the misguided and dangerous policy commissioned by Health Canada and implemented by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) in a misguided, failed attempt to slow drug overdoses in Canada....Currently no doctor will prescribe the medication that this man was taking out of medical necessity that enabled him to live a reasonably decent life.
21 September 2020
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9 December 2019
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4 November 2019
A 2019 survey by the Chronic Pain Association of Canada (CPAC) finds that chronic pain patients are experiencing a decline in quality of life, an increase in pain, the destruction of doctor-patient relationships, and suicide risks and attempts. In 2017, Health Canada commissioned a prescribing guideline for pain patients in a misguided attempt to combat overdose deaths. The reality is that coroners’ report that more than 92% of overdoses involve bootleg fentanyl, usually mixed with heroin and other street drugs, and alcohol (not "diverted" or stolen prescriptions). Medically-managed patients are not involved in overdoses yet their care has been decimated.
21 July 2019
The report underscores Health Canada’s knee-jerk reaction to what Ottawa calls the “opioid crisis”— medical opiates aren’t good for pain relief in the short or long term. They don’t work, and they caused the “crisis.” Right?
Wrong. But now Ottawa has assembled partisan “experts” to underwrite its fiction.
20 July 2019
For Scott McLeod, Registrar, College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta (CPSA)
Read the full media release (PDF)
15 July 2019
Scott Stevens would give anything to live in the world Dr Scott McLeod described in his commentary for the Edmonton Journal and the
Calgary Heraldon Friday.
McLeod, registrar of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta (CPSA), wrote that under his direction Alberta’s doctors are providing excellent, up-to-date care to Albertans in serious pain and no one should be going begging for help.
But Stevens, of Stony Plain, says he doesn’t live in McLeod’s idyll. Instead, he lives in hell.
8 July 2019
2 July 2019
2 July 2019
Citing a need for “safe supply” across Canada, some doctors in Ontario have started prescribing medical opiates to patients with addiction to keep them from dangerous street markets—while Ontarians and Canadians with intractable pain now go begging for these same therapeutic drugs.
13 June 2019
A large group of patients meeting in Edmonton this week has asked the Alberta health minister to investigate the medical regulator that licenses the province's MDs for its unwarranted and secret cautioning and sanctioning of doctors trying to prescribe for Albertans suffering severe and intractable pain and unable to live without medically-managed opiates.
Thousands of Albertans with pain have lost specialist and primary care because the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta has forced doctors to stop prescribing opiates. The province's pain specialists are retiring in large numbers, citing College intimidation.Read the full media release (PDF).
23 May 2019
In the last month, the American Medical Association, the FDA, the CDC, and the US Surgeon General have all called for an end to brutal policies that have been weaponized against millions of Americans, stripping them of the medical opiates they need to fight persistent pain. And on May 30, a US Department of Health and Human Services pain management task force will join this wave of national protest by releasing its own formal caution against deprescribing.
Read the full media release (PDF)
Read CPAC's Response letter to the Federal Minister of Health (PDF)