Throw the Bums Out -- No Incumbents - EVER AGAIN!

Low Cost and Free Resources for Finding People On-Line and Off

In an effort to support patients, family members, and medical professionals who deal with facial neuralgias , a few years ago I teamed with Ms. Cindy Fleishman, a 25-year-plus chronic pain survivor, to develop a one-stop site for face pain information focused on these disorders. After over two years of Cindy's research and additional months of our co-editing, the result was a site with 120+ subsidiary pages that we wrote ourselves or compiled and abridged with permission from other sources.  While this site is no longer available to the public due to the burden it became to keep current, we have archived our links and files.  To tap into these resources, please feel free to correspond by email.

Independently of my effort at Face Pain Resources, I have long supported  the Trigeminal Neuralgia Association, now called the "Facial Pain Association".  I was a member of its Board of Directors for three years and webmaster for the TNA Home Page in the late 1990s. The site provides medically authoritative information on the disorder as well as a gateway to a network of US and international support groups.  If you know of someone suffering from a sudden, sharp onset of stabbing pain in one side of the face, please refer them to TNA or to introductory notes that I maintain here at "Giving Something Back."  

In a more recent effort on behalf of chronic face pain patients, I was fir a time, a site administrator and Moderator at "Living With TN" -- an online community of over 7,000 face pain survivors and family members engaged in mutual emotional support, information research, and referral to knowledgeable doctors.   Several of the resources below were written for Living With TN.

Unexplained Facial Pain - Introduction 

Bookmarks for Chronic Facial Pain

Who Gets TN? Demographics of A Social Networking Website

[MS-Word Version]   [HTML Version]

Demographics of 202 Facial Neurologial Pain Patients At A Social Networking Website

Diagnosis and Treatment of Chronic Face Pain

Coping with Crisis -- A Seminar for Facial Pain Patients

Another resource from the US  National Library of Medicine provides an authoritative overview from medical literature, for diagnosis and treatment of Trigeminal Neuralgia.  See

 Treatment options in trigeminal neuralgia

 Facial pain patients are sometimes so deeply affected or disabled by pain that they go into crisis and need emergency medical intervention.  But especially with trigeminal neuralgia, they may be unable to speak clearly or even in rare instances to articulate their thoughts.  With these realities in mind, I have developed a one-page "Attending Physician Advisory" form, to help patents get emergency pain care when they cannot speak clearly.  This form should be filled out in advance of need and carried by the patient at all times.  It can be presented to the admissions clerk at any hospital emergency room, dispensary, or community clinic. Visitors to this website are authorized to print out as many copies as you think you may need.  Please do not remove the copyright marking from the foot of the form.

Likewise, feel free to email me concerning on-line information resources.  I have corresponded with almost 3000 face pain patients during the past 17 years.  Although I am not a doctor, I may be able to help you find a professional who is appropriately trained and experienced in addressing your pain management needs. 

As a continuing contribution to chronic face pain patients, I sometimes support patient support groups with presentations on Trigeminal Neuralgia and related disorders.  In January 2003, I gave the following overview of then-recent research in facial pain, for the Bethesda Maryland / Washington DC TN support group.  Feel free to download and print it out.  However any further use of this material should credit the author and this webpage as source...

Presentation: Recent Research in Trigeminal Neuralgia

Related to this presentation, the following collection of Pub Med abstracts will introduce you to research on TN and facial neuropathy.  This material is somewhat dated due to demands of my involvement with patient support groups.

Review of Recent Medical Literature on Trigeminal Neuralgia

Review of Recent Medical Literature on Trigeminal Neuropathy

As part of ths overview, I would offer additional links to other resources which I consider valuable to anyone who deals with chronic face pain.  I have at various times contributed peripheral articles or editing services to some. But none of them are necessarily influenced by my research or points of view.

Facial Neuralgia Resources

This is a patient-centered resource, with a 15-year-plus history of generating  very well-organized research and information for patients who are searching for answers to severe facial pain.

For chronic face pain patients, one of the on-going issues is very often how to obtain affordable health care.  The following overview of the subject has been expanded from research by Susie Margaret Ross, a helping colleague on the Neurological Disorders patient forum at Web MD.  This collection has not been approved or validated by WebMD or anybody else. 

Free and Low-Cost Medical Care Resources

Another dimension of finding effective medical care is simply to locate a physician who knows about the disorders and issues you are dealing with.  One of the better places for doing that can be a teaching hospital.  The following list of university hospitals around the world may be a place to start, for locating physicians who are better than average trained, and current on research.

Wikipedia List of University Hospitals

Special Topic:  Prescription Opioids and Chronic Pain

On October 22, 2016, I gave an invited address to the Washington Rally Against Pain, on the Ellipse just south of the White House.  The title was "CDC Guidelines On Prescription Opioids are Neat, Plausible... and Mostly Wrong."  Full text of that address is provided here.  I also addressed the Opioid Policy Steering Committee of the US Food and Drug Agency on January 30, 2018. 

Anyone who reads a newspaper these days has been exposed to a barrage of hype and misinformation concerning a supposed "epidemic" of accidental overdose deaths due to prescription opioid medications.  In my view, there is no such epidemic.  Instead, we have a lot of politicians who don't dare appear as if they aren't "doing something".  And what they've chosen to do is to persecute chronic pain patients by withdrawing opioids from the healthcare services market, in the name of reducing overdose deaths due to street drugs.  Unfortunately, there is very little relationship between the two.  With this in mind, I have sent the following letter to the Office for Intergovernmental and Public Liazon at the White House, and separately to the Office for Drug Control Policy. It is one of a large number of advocacy pieces I have published in recent years.

Stop the War Against Chronic Pain Patients and Their Doctors!

To the Office of Intergovernmental & Public Liaison.
The White House

Dear Staffer,

I am writing to you as a non-physician chronic pain patient advocate with 20 years of experience and study in the field. I now support 15,000 chronic pain patients in 20 groups on Facebook. Every week I see more reports of pain patients being involuntarily weaned down or forced off opioids by doctors who fear persecution by the DEA unless they obey scientifically weak and professionally biased "voluntary" guidelines on prescription of opioids in adult non-cancer chronic pain.

Make no mistake -- this is truly "persecution" not just prosecution. Doctors are leaving pain management practice because they can no longer effectively treat their patients without fear of DEA reprisals. Highly competent practitioners have already been subjected to trumped-up charges in what amounts to a public witch hunt. Patients are being deserted without opioid withdrawal management. Thousands are allowed to spiral into agony when forced to attempt other non-opioid therapies that didn't work in the first place and won't work now. Some patients are on the brink of suicide. Deaths have already occurred. And responsibility for this state of affairs clearly lies with the medical negligence and addiction bias of the CDC.

The CDC voluntary practice guidelines are in truth neither voluntary nor "guidelines". They are read by doctors as a restrictive standard that is being used to justify DEA prosecutions. And they were written by a consultants' working group that failed to include a SINGLE Board Certified pain management specialist who actually sees patients regularly. Careful analysis of medical literature quoted as justification of these standards reveals a plethora of major issues of weak methodology, bad science and biased selection of data to support political agendas or professional economic self-interest.

Despite the propaganda now circulating about a supposed "epidemic" of deaths due to prescription opioids, medical reality is vastly different from the dominant narrative. Among properly screened chronic pain patients who are periodically monitored, the risk of addiction disorder is small -- certainly under 10%, probably under 3%. People in chronic pain do not experience an opioid high in the manner of addicts. Nor do any great number of them develop the drug-seeking behaviors characteristic of substance abuse disorder. Some become physically dependent on opioid meds for pain relief. They will experience withdrawal symptoms and breakthrough pain when rapidly withdrawn -- but these symptoms are NOT the same thing as addiction.

The most fundamental error of the CDC has been to deliberately misinterpret an absence of published long-term trials on opioid effectiveness, to substitute the fraudulent message that opioids don't work. Doctors don't know definitively whether or how well these medications work, because nobody has ASKED, and research organizations haven't wanted to risk liability by conducting double-blind opioid trials.

Also false is the assertion that all patients develop tolerance or hyperalgesia when using opioid medication. Hyperagesia (increased sensitivity to pain after medical suppression) is very likely a made-up medical mythology, not a fact. The methodology underlying Morphine Milligram Equivalent Dose levels is also founded on pseudoscience and opinion, not metrics. And reports used by the CDC to justify upper limits on opioid prescription levels were wildly internally contradictory and subject to multiple confounding factors.

Drug addiction and deaths due to street drugs are indeed a major public health issue in the US. But prescription drugs did not cause this issue, and the abuse of chronic pain patients won't solve it. Some sources quote rising numbers of accidental deaths due to opioids, on the order of 32,000 per year in 2014. But well over half of these deaths are due to street drugs, and many of the remaining deaths are likely misidentified by ill-trained and poorly resourced medical examiners. Overshadowing these statistics is the reality that there are over 100 Million chronic pain patients in the US, millions of whom are successfully treated by opioid medication under regular medical oversight.

As noted by neuro-science journalist Maia Szalavitz in her excellent article on Scientific American, the most reliable predictors for death by opioid overdose are unemployment, a family history of trauma, and status as an adolescent. Diversion of prescription drugs from legitimate pain patients to the street are a definite issue. But deaths among people with a current prescription are relatively rare. Thus the CDC and DEA are trying to "solve" a largely non-existent problem by means which impose agony on hundreds of thousands of patients -- or more.

I implore the White House staff to take off the blinders. It is time that CDC practice guidelines are withdrawn and rewritten to recognize the indispensable role of opiod medications in the management of chronic pain. Also needed is support for the central role of the individual physician in evaluating what works and what doesn't. The days of pill mills are largely over. And the "war on drugs" has been an abject failure. Please do not contribute to the further persecution and abuse of millions of chronic pain patients and their doctors!

Stop the war against chronic pain patients and their doctors!

Sincerely,
======================
I have also published  multiple articles and papers on US and State policy and regulation of opiod pain relievers.  Much of that work can be found at "Face Facts" (http://www.face-facts.org/Lawhern)

Resources for General Healthcare Education

In a more general sense, I may also be able to suggest resources to expand your personal  healthcare education, in fields other than chronic pain.  As a part of the community service work that I do on the Internet, I once supported three "Experts" forums at Yahoo.  In the Men's, Women's and Stress Management groups at Yahoo, several resident volunteers answered questions from all comers, dealing with physical and mental health issues, personal growth, family life, and interpersonal relationships.  Some of the questions that kids (and some adults) ask at Yahoo and other public forums  might seem a bit outrageous to a person who has a college education.  Other questions express urgent needs for help, voiced by people who are hurting, scared, or simply uncertain of what to do next.  Taken in total, these questions reveal a lot about the health and personal concerns that occupy people around the world:

Frequently Asked Questions About Healthcare 

- (And About Life) -
 

In the US in the new Century, there is a great amount of discontent over the state of our politics in Federal, State, and local government. Quite a number of people have become convinced that something fundamental in our governance is broken.  Enough of us thought that way that we elected an inexperienced though articulate junior senator to lead the nation.   So far he hasn't done very well. When he won the 2012 election, it was because his opponent is too inept to tie his own shoelaces without a script written by big-money special interests. And Obama has been no less beholden to the same interests.

Meanwhile, millions of us are totally disgusted with efforts by entrenched political elites - including but not restricted to those who helped to elect Obama -- to ram something called "health care reform' down our throats -- legislation which reforms nothing about health care costs and will almost certainly increase middle class taxes while further burdening the medicare system. We also see Congress still maneuvering to slip through an amnesty for illegal immigrants despite the outrage of resisting citizens.  The bums continue with this idiocy despite the wide-spread evidence that voters just aren't having any of that nonsense.  The feeling is widespread that something really fundamental in our politics has to change, and soon.

As a leader in America, the President has repeatedly failed to exercise leadership.  Worse than that, however, Mister Obama early in his first term appointed several people as his advisers on the US economy, who should now be doing long prison sentences for their active participation in speculation and frauds that led directly to the financial crisis in 2008.  People like Treasury Secretary Geithner (then a chairman of the Federal Reserve bank of New York)  stood by and watched as their friends on Wall Street ripped off investors to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, and then walked away scott free.  Despite multi-Billion dollar settlements with major banks, not one of these crooks has been seriously investigated, much less indicted.

Mister Romney and his Republican and far-right Tea Party zealots were no better.  Like other Republicans, Romney signed a pledge not to raise the taxes of the super-rich whose super-PAC political money was expected to elect him.  He also artfully dodged away from explaining any concrete plan for bringing Federal government spending anywhere close to our likely tax receipts.  The numbers don't add up, you nitwits!  You can't balance the budget without raising tax rates on the top one half of one percent, AS WELL AS lowering the level of benefits provided by Social Security and Medicare.  It won't happen, And by avoiding this issue, our political system has made the meltdown in our social safety net all the worse when it occurs. Which it will.

I've reached a point where I am no longer willing to be made an accomplice to political fraud. I can't vote for either of these parties or their puppets.  So this year, when I go to the polls, I'll either vote Libertarian or leave the boxes for President blank.  It doesn't matter which of the nominated fools we elect.  They are all in the pockets of the super-rich, and nobody will bite the hands that fed them. 

NEXT YEAR, I'M NOT GOING TO VOTE FOR PRESIDENT

Many loose-knit groups of people in the US believe that there ought to be an alternative to the mess we're seeing in Washington and our Statehouses. We come from all parties, or from no party at all.  However we are united in believing that voters need an effective means of informing political elites that they have lost touch with the electorate, which is us.  One proposal for doing that might be to insert a voting choice on the ballot for every office in the land, for "NOTA: None of the Above."  If NOTA gets a plurality of votes, then the slate is wiped clean and we have a special election where the previous bums don't get to run. I find this idea intriguing and perhaps long overdue. For an expansion of this proposal, click on Write In None of the Above

During the months before the next elections, both of the 10-year-old automobiles at our house will proudly display this bumper sticker:

Congress is the Problem!
Throw ALL the Bums Out

And we will vote under that policy.  If a politician has been in office before, then he or she is a part of the problem, not the solutions.  Even the guys who protest that they've been trying to reform the rest of Congress, don't deserve to go back.  If they tried at all, then they failed.

I've had opportunities in a varied career to turn my hand to a lot of different subjects, and to dabble at hobbies, interests, and small businesses. Because this web page is about giving back, I invite inquiries on any of the following  subjects. I'll do my best to find you good information or to share my own experiences regarding any of the following.

• Assistance in Profession 
  • On-Line resources for job searchers
  • Career preparation and resume writing (send me yours!). 
  • Technical and liberal arts education 
  • Graduate schools 
  • Why American Education is "Failing".
  • Why very few people "need" a Ph.D. -- in ANYTHING! 
  • US military service (Lt. Col., USAF, retired)
    
    
• Learning from Life Experiences 
  • Finding a compatible mate
  • Psychotherapy or counseling -- how to pick a therapist 
  • Gestalt therapy and related techniques (former client) 
  • Searching for a religious experience that makes sense
  • A Way Less Traveled - Alternatives to Traditional Religion     [HTML Version]    [MS-Word Version]
  • Journeys of a Commoner - The autobiography of the author of this website
    
  • Investment Advice for Fun and Profit -- Theirs, Not Yours!
  • Life skills
    
    
  • Living with an alcoholic child -- and learning to let go 
  • Divorce and emotional survival 
  • Sexual harassment and personal development issues for women 
  • Running a small business 
  • Building sun decks and retaining walls 
   
• Hobbies, Sports and Interests 
  • Diamonds, gemstones and jewelry design (I have been a gem broker).  Here is an example of my design work.   
  • Sailing (my wife and I cruised weekends for seven years on our Bristol 34 sloop, and another six on a smaller S-2 Model 8.0B) 
  • Photographic Art - Images in Light.  Several galleries of my work are featured here on "Giving Something Back"
  • Also featured as photography is a short book, titled  "An American Journey".  This work describes my impressions from a 6500 mile, five-week coast to coast trailer trip through America.  There are over 100 scenic pictures from US National Parks and the American West
    
  • Science fiction 
  • Macro-economics and public policy (a different form of science fiction) 
  • Psychic experiences, telepathy and clairvoyance (yes I am -- and probably so are you) 

In the Spring of 2006, Rafiki went on the hard at Annapolis Sail Yard and was sold.  We've relocated about 30 minutes south of Charlotte NC.  The picture below offers some idea of why we were so happy with our sailing friend.   I would recommend Bristol boats without reservation, for just about any kind of sail cruising.
 

Go in Peace and Power

Last Updated -- April 2018

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