Media
29 January 2020
Dr. Nancy Whitmore, the registrar of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO), has informed CPAC that Ontario doctors would no longer be required to force taper chronic pain patients from their opiate medicines arbitrarily.
26 January 2020
After our last teleconference, we sent Andrea Currie, Canadian Pain Task Force Secretariat, an update on the status of two patients in Ontario that were mentioned in that call. One was the young lady who was the subject of a Chatelaine article and the other was Mr. Dan Wallace, the retired police detective and former member of the Canadian Military.
For Mr. Wallace, we mentioned that he was fired by his current doctor who has been busy tapering him against his will such that his blood sugar has become unstable and a concern to his endocrinologist who fears for his life. The increase in pain is causing the worsening of his diabetes.
8 January 2020
Is the new Canadian government finally deciding to get serious about rectifying the harms they have inflicted on chronic pain patients or is Prime Minister Trudeau;s mandate letter to the Minister of Health, Patty Hajdu, simply more verbiage?
9 December 2019
Chronic pain patients are in critical shape thanks to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in the US and Health Canada in this country. However, there is one enormous difference. The American Medical Association (AMA) has come to the aid of their pain patients by refuting the claim that pain patients caused the overdose crisis and demanding an end to arbitrary dosing recommendations. The Canadian Medical Association (CMA) however, remains silent.
2 December 2019
Health Canada continues the unethical treatment of pain patients. Wrongly blamed for the increase of overdose deaths from illicit drugs, chronic pain patients have had their opiate medications forcibly reduced or stripped from them altogether and the results have been disastrous.
In the meantime, Justin Trudeau is open to granting the city of Vancouver $6 million to provide addicts with pharmaceutical grade heroin so that they have a safe supply.
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)
I have talked with a good many Canadian patients who are now actively being denied safe and effective treatment with opioid analgesics, due to the draconian and scientifically unsupported policies of your Colleges. Several have been "deprescribed" despite the reality that there are no published trials data supporting positive outcomes for mandated tapering of opioids in otherwise stable patients...Further denial of pain care is simply MADNESS!
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
In order to deal with overdose deaths among illicit drug users, Health Canada decided to go after chronic pain patients and their doctors this in the purported belief that they could reduce deaths. The department’s website, press releases, TV advertising, and the Minister’s statements all make clear that Health Canada is blaming part of the increase in overdoses on some imagined increase in the use of prescribed opiate medicines by Canadian patients.
Prescribing of these drugs in Canada has, in fact, plunged.
2 July 2019
Unprincipled research continues to push a national trend to deprescribing opiate pain relievers for the million or so Canadians with high-impact pain, including children, who rely on the drugs to live.
In an audacious example, a presentation this past week at the annual conference of the Canadian Association of Urologists in Quebec City claimed that post-surgical use of opiate analgesia carries significant risk of addiction and overdose.
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)
For more information, contact:
Barry Ulmer, Executive Director
Telephone (780) 482-6727 | Fax (780) 433-3128