Tennessee Pain Management New Laws July 2013 (Page 2)

People in Tennessee who are in pain management or are being prescribed pain meds are no aware of all the new laws that went into effect July, 1. 2013. I have been with the same Dr. for nearly three years, he told me last month about these changes and that I would have to see him at his new pain clinic for the month of July. Before I could see him I had to go through all the red tape,. everyone at the pain clinic was aware of me coming in, they all knew me by name even though it was my first visit. I had to talk to a law enforcement official who finger printed me, took my picture, did a background check and preformed a drug test, checked me for needle marks, etc. all this before I could see my Dr. Oh yeah, and I had to pay up too. Once I got to see my doctor we talked about all these changes made by the legislators in Nashville. After Oct. 1 and then Jan 1 of 2014 they are wanted pain patients to try a holistic or non narcotic route before they get any narcotics, of course the people making these rules and new laws are affiliated with these alternative procedures so they can make their money. If anyone in the great state of Tennessee is experiencing these hassles and are getting tired of being treated like a criminal just to see your doctor please contact me, we can change this but we have to go through Nashville. I have four legislators who are on the side of the people in pain. We are starting a pain advocacy group to bring to Nashville but we need more people, there is power in numbers so I need to hear from everyone. I will be posting on here soon with a page you can go to so you can tell your story and get these ridiculous laws changed.

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Add me to your list of protest. My entire stomach is held together by netting that frequently pops and comes out my skin, causing severe pain. I have been on pain medication since my surgery(dual renal and liver failure) for 12 years now and all of a sudden my doctor tells me she will no longer prescribe to me that I should get off pain meds altogether because of the new law. I literally cannot bear the pain without medication. I am so afraid of what is going to happen.

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the people making these laws don't live with pain so they think that we are just COMPLAINING and that the pain is all in our heads. I WISH THEY COULD LIVE ONE WEEK IN OUR SHOES AND THEN TELL THEMIT IS ALL IN THEIR HEADS.

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Good luck getting this law changed. I called Gov. Haslam, didn't do any good. They don't care that we suffer. Looks like they could keep their nose out of our medical care. Or at least left the ones who had been on these meds alone. Its gonna be suffer or die. Now the cartels have moved in. All they did was hurt honest people.

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I have used narcotics prescribed by a reputable pain clinic woth a pain mangement specialost supervising for 6 or 7 years now, and would not be able to function w/o them. I had had to take early retiretirement from my job in 2002, but once I got the right dosage of drugs and other help, was able to return t work on a consulting basis, and also to return to other activities I had enjoyed bdefore the chronic pan got so bad--dog breeding and showing, horesback riding (I did eventualy have to give that up again) and the like. I just found out on 5/17-15 that I no longer will be able to see that clinic and have to go to another clinic owned by some state representativves. I'm panicky about how my kuife will fall apart if this is as bad as I expect it to be. (I had tried the so-called holistic methods before I went to a pain clinic--they don't work well and I can't afford them as insurance won't pay Why were we not informed that this was coming? I'd be happy to participate in a patient acvocacy group. Do wehave any recourse at all?

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I am in chronic pain. Have been cut to 1/3 of what I was taking. I agree that this law must be changed.

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I would like to be included in thereform of the new drug laws. I have a very painful condition that is EVIDENCE-BACKED an have to travel about 400 miles round trip to a pain clinic. This is ABSURD. Please contact me A.S.A.P.

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How do I help fight this new law. I too I am a chronic pain patient and have been throated off by Pain Clinic's not giving me my medication even though the law states that I am exempt due to the fact I have been on the same medications for several years without increasing I am in Memphis Tn

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Need new pain management dr in Memphis Tn to treat chronic pain oxycodone 30 tid Oxycotin 60 er tid. I should be exempt from current laws but current pain dr has put me on horrible regime. Will end up in hospital if I can't manage this pain. Can see almost any provider.

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What planet you living on. This law is bulls*** that has made old people who are in pain suffer because junkies are dying because they've abused these meds. Anybody who thinks this law has or will change anything think again. All it helps is the ones who passed this law. Truth be told they own a pain clinic. And they or their families won't suffer like we do.

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I have been a pain patient since 2009. When they began shutting up all the doctors around here I decided to search outside the Tennessee area and went to a doctor in Mississippi and New Orleans for about a year each before my psychiatrist told me that he could write me my pain medications. To make a long story short I ended up at a clinic right up the street from me for about four years and the doctor or anesthesiologist quit the clinic and therefore they could no longer prescribe narcotics. I then tried a clinic that was new to the area but wasn’t up and rising clinic in Tennessee and other areas surrounding Tennessee CPS and I did not have a very good experience. Once my old anesthesiologist established his new clinic here in Memphis they called me and asked if I would like to come back to him and I booked an appointment and left CPS. However two months later he quit and closed his clinic to move to a new clinic and become their anesthesiologist without warning or telling his patients anything about it. I guess I was just one of the lucky ones that got the car so I made the appointment and everything was going fine up until about two months ago when I had a positive alcohol test from my cough medicine that I have to take for my COPD. There are two components they test when they check for alcohol these days these are ETS and ETG. The ETS is the more accurate of the two because ETG can be absorbed into your body by a variety of different environmental things even purrell hand lotion. Two months after this task and signing the waiver that I would not drink, I had a very low positive ETG and totally negative ETS. I am diabetic and always have glucose in my urine and at the time I even had a yeast infection not to mention that instead of taking the pill I used tux pads in order to relieve the itching and it always has worked before and it had work this time. Needless to say because of this low 565 where the cut off was 500 I was fired from the clinic and found myself with no other clinics available to go to. I even called the laboratory who did the test and they told me that the fact that I was diabetic was probably the reason my ETG was a little high. He said that a person who had drinking alcohol would definitely have had ETS in their system with a level of ETG that I had in my system. I was never allowed to talk with the doctor face-to-face and was only allowed to talk with the 20-year-old tech toxicologist that didn’t even know the Krebs cycle or how alcohol was really truly made because he made a comment that you didn’t have to have glucose to make alcohol. I had to laugh and shake my head.

I’m a PhD bio chemist and I have taught several thousand students the process of anaerobic respiration in humans. I felt like I was giving him the lesson all over again because not only did he not know the Krebs cycle which is aerobic respiration that occurs in humans and in the cells but he had absolutely no clue about anaerobic respiration and the intermediate buy products that are produced during the cycle and he tried to use big words like acetoacetate which is actually acetyl aldehyde along with carbon dioxide that is formed during the process of anaerobic respiration. For all of that matters I could’ve had a UTI and being a diabetic could have caused that level as well but they did not check for Bacteria nor did they check for other things such as glucose in my urine. Bacteria and yeast both will use glucose under anaerobic respiration to form alcohol exactly the same way. Needless to say I have now found my self without a pain doctor and my primary care doctor has put me on Palliative care I guess until I can find a new clinic or doctor who will write me the correct dosage of medication to help me lead a normal life or halfway to normal life. On top of the fact that I have all these problems I have been taking care of my elderly mother and had to take POA of her last year and unfortunately right now I have her in a facility so that I can try and take care of my business and hopefully find someone to write my medications. I hope that being on pallets of care will allow my primary care physician a little leeway and let him write me enough medication so that I can bring my mother back home and not have to worry about going to a facility 70 miles away when I have a horrible case of neuropathy in both feet and can’t feel the petals when I drive so I don’t like to drive at all and quite frankly if the doctors knew how bad it is they would revoke my license. My neurologist has me scheduled for a new or my yearly nerve conduction test next week but that doesn’t solve my problem it just is going to show how bad or if my neuropathy has gotten better or worse over the past year which I can tell them it’s worse. Just one other item to explain is that my neuropathy is not from being a diabetic - my endocrinologist told me this when he first checked me and did a nerve conduction test and said that there was absolutely no way that the neuropathy could be so bad because my A1c was not high enough for it to be causing the levels of nerve conduction and numbness that I have in both my feet and legs and that it has to be from my back injury that I had.

I have been out and exhausted every clinic here in Memphis that I know of and every doctor that I know of that would write me my medications or the level of medications I need to lead the life that would allow me to take care of myself and my mother at the same time. I feel so bad every time I go to see her when she asked when I’m I coming home because I really truly do not know. She has now been put in isolation and containment because she caught scabies there or at the hospital. Therefore she is not being allowed to walk the halls and get the help that she needs in order to come home and do some of the things that I cannot fathom doing because of my illness. Do you have any other suggestions because the closest clinic that I can find that I haven’t been fired from or dismissed due to stupid things not even related to contractual reasons? For instance there is a doctor in Southhaven that is about 15 miles up the road and eight years ago I tried to get into their clinic and see one of the doctors, however, because they did not write the medication that I was on at the time they put me on a list where I could not ever come back there. Again this has happened at as far as I know every clinic here in the Memphis area.

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