Episode Details

The Doctor Patient Forum is a non-partisan, community-based organization that works to support pain patients and their physicians with access to lifesaving pain relief and to mitigate the harmful effects of efforts to curb liberal prescribing and overdose. With a focus on disabled people, those in chronic pain, and physicians who work with them, DPF provides information, practical tools, and policy analysis to strengthen patient-centered safe and appropriate medical support and advocates for approaches that reduce increasingly common suffering and death resulting from non-consensual medication reduction or termination of care.   Raising Awareness and Improving Conditions For: 
• Pain patients facing non-consensual medication reduction 
• Termination of treatment 
• Untreated pain

Well-intended responses to the overdose crisis by state and federal authorities have caused unintended harmful consequences including patient dismissal / termination of care and forced/non-consensual opioid and benzodiazepine tapers, which have led to a crisis of medically abandoned patients, suffering, and even death.

Guests: 
Claudia A. Merandi 
DPF Board Member, Executive Director, President

Beverly Schechtman 
DPF Board Member, Director, Vice President