Doctor Urges More Drugs for Cancer Patients

The war against drug abuse contributes to needless suffering by cancer patients because doctors treat them like street addicts instead of prescribing adequate doses of painkilling narcotics, an expert says.

“Patients in pain suffer from the failure to distinguish between the legitimate and illegitimate use of these drugs. The war on drugs fails to distinguish,” Dr. C. Stratton Hill, cancer pain director at the University of Texas’ M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, said during a recent American Cancer Society forum for science writers in Irvine.

Hill said cultural pressures, previously existing tradition, inadequate medical school training and sometimes-justified fear of prosecution or disciplinary action spurs doctors to “prescribe doses that are too small over an unrealistic (infrequent) time frame.”

“Nobody wants to be the first kid on the block to order the Demerol as it should be given,” he said of the morphine-like painkiller.

When cancer patients complain of pain and request more narcotics, “we treat that patient as a street addict,” Hill said, adding that the “just say no” anti-drug campaign “certainly hasn’t helped anything.”

Hill said the nation’s severe drug abuse problem destroys lives, but for cancer patients suffering pain, drugs also can “restore a better quality of life.”

Because many doctors perceive narcotics as bad, “they are frequently reserved for pain relief as close to death as possible,” he said. “The patient may therefore suffer for significant periods before the physician considers him or her terminal and justifies use of a narcotic.”