Doctors And Activists Asked The President [to Provide Pain Relief For Dying Patients]

2023 Author: Abraham Higgins | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-30 04:59

Doctors and activists asked the president [to provide pain relief for dying patients]

Health workers and cancer activists have once again asked for improved access to pain medications. They sent a letter with a corresponding appeal to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. This letter explains why, due to the existing anti-drug legislation, incurable patients are forced to die in agony.

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Health workers and cancer activists have once again asked for improved access to pain medications. They sent a letter with a corresponding appeal to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, according to the Moskovskiye Novosti newspaper.

“Because of the existing rules, even a good doctor who wants to help his patient has to go to incredible tricks to provide him with the minimum amount of painkillers. But often doctors simply choose not to get involved with drugs, since reporting on them is extremely difficult. in this case, the patient is forced to die in agony, "Anna Federmesser, president of the Vera hospice fund, is quoted as saying.

According to the current legislation, narcotic analgesics can only be purchased by relatives of an oncological patient or social workers in the only pharmacy that works with a polyclinic at the place of residence. The prescription on a special form, signed by the attending physician and chief physicians, is valid for five days. The whole process of acquiring the drug takes many hours, which a relative could spend with a dying patient. At the same time, a hospice employee cannot deliver medicines to a patient.

According to the president of the all-Russian public movement "Medicine for the quality of life" Georgy Novikov, in such conditions, there is no talk about the availability of modern anesthetics, such as plasters with the drug, at all - many doctors have not even heard of them. Not a single Russian medical institution trains specialized specialists in palliative care.

Because of this, the level of consumption of opioid analgesics by Russian patients is regarded by the International Narcotics Control Board as low - less than 200 conventional daily doses per million people per day. In developed countries, this figure ranges from one thousand to 20 thousand doses.

At the same time, narcotic drugs, according to Novikov, are necessary for about 90 percent of inoperable cancer patients. In total, about two million residents of the Russian Federation need palliative care a year.

Because of this, the authors of the letter to the President, including the chief pediatric oncologist of Russia Vladimir Polyakov, the director of the Federal Scientific and Clinical Center for Pediatric Hematology, Oncology and Immunology, Alexander Rumyantsev, the chief pediatric surgeon of Moscow, Alexander Razumovsky, director of the Research Institute of Blood Transfusion, Academician Vladimir Gorodetsky, and Fund "Give Life" Ekaterina Chistyakova, asked to change the relevant laws and orders.

In their opinion, the doctor should be responsible not for the amount of the prescribed drug, but for the result of the treatment, that is, pain relief. For this, first of all, it is necessary to legislatively introduce in the Russian Federation the fulfillment of the criteria for anesthesia adopted by the World Health Organization, according to which the patient should receive as much medicine as is necessary in his individual case.

The struggle of physicians and activists for access of incurable patients to pain relief has been going on for several years, but the relevant points of the anti-drug legislation have not been revised.