In the battle against opioid addiction, has the pendulum swung too far, to the point that people are forced to live in pain because doctors won’t prescribe adequate medication?

That’s the premise of one pain patient advocate, Kaylin Bower, who presented a program entitled “The Other Side of the Opioid Epidemic: The Crisis of Untreated Pain and Unrelieved Suffering,” at the recent Pennsylvania Pain and Addiction Summit held at Wilkes University.

Bower believes that the federal government and the medical community have gone overboard in their restrictions on the prescription of opioids for pain relief. As a result, chronic pain sufferers have been lumped together with people suffering from opioid use disorder (OUD). These patients are being forced to live in pain so that their use of medication does not violate guidelines.

In an article on chronic pain for the Journal of Primary Care and Community Health, Dr. Joanna G. Katzman from the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, and Dr. Rollin MacGallagher from the American Academy of Pain Medicine in Chicago estimate the number of Americans suffering from chronic pain at 50 million in 2025. We are not talking about a small problem here:

Large health inequities also exist in access to effective pain care for vulnerable populations. […] There are both barriers to care and stigma for patients with pain, including those taking prescribed doses of long-term opioids, those with known substance use disorder, and those with mental health diagnoses.

The result is that “many chronic pain patients suffer in silence without getting the care they need.” Bower recites a checklist for excessive pain medication use that she says discriminates against patients with a chronic pain diagnosis:

• Running out early.
• Early refill request.
• Multiple pharmacies used.
• Hoarding medications.
• Dosage escalation.
• Unprescribed drug usage.

In a video about the problem of untreated pain, a trio of writers for The New York Times state, “Pain patients have become the unintended victims of a national crackdown on opioid prescribing.” The video interviews chronic pain sufferers who paint vivid pictures of the pain they suffer. 

The New York Times pegs the number of Americans with “debilitating chronic pain” at 17 million, far less than an estimated 50 million chronic pain sufferers, yet still roughly 5% of the U.S. population. For many of these people, opioid medications are lifesavers. They make it possible for chronic pain sufferers to maintain a semblance of normal human functioning, including attending school, working, and parenting.

Doctors have tried to wean chronic pain patients off opioids and onto less effective pain medications such as Tylenol and ibuprofen. The results have been agony for patients whose pain goes unmanaged. Doctors refuse to write prescriptions, and they’re forced to find painkillers on the black market. The New York Times writes:

A brief ray of hope last year, the C.D.C. realized its error and updated its guidelines. But they’re not filtering down to every state or physician.

Chronic pain patients are upset that their quality of life is being destroyed because of the misinterpretation of government guidelines and physicians unwillingness to prescribe adequately for their needs. In an article for CNN Health, writers for Kaiser Health News explained the unintended consequences of the restrictions on opioid prescriptions:

[A]bruptly stopping medication they’d been taking for years carries risks of withdrawal, depression, anxiety, and even suicide.

The CDC relaxed its guidelines in November 2023, but the news has yet to filter down through the medical community, which for years has been avoiding patients requiring chronic pain medication. Kaylin Bower, in her presentation at the Pennsylvania Pain and Addiction Summit, encouraged health professionals to practice harm reduction in their treatment of chronic pain. The harm reduction movement is a backlash against the abstinence movement and argues for allowing a level of use that allows the patient to function best.

Recently, we have written about new non-opioid painkillers that are in clinical trials. One painkiller that reportedly performed better against chronic lower back pain than opioids is THC. It is a tremendous insult to medicine that people were prescribed addictive opioid painkillers for lower back pain because a more effective THC alternative was illegal to prescribe.

Another new treatment uses gene therapy to turn off the brain circuits that convey the pain message. It has been shown to be effective in studies with mice and will soon start clinical trials.

It may be some time before non-addictive painkillers prove as effective as opiates at silencing the pain signal. Until then, diagnosis requires individual evaluation before a judgment of excessive use can be made. The current pattern of prescription has left many patients in a prison of pain. The solution is empathy, compassion, and advocating for patients’ needs against a system that knows nothing of their pain.

Written by Steve O’Keefe. First published May 11, 2026.

Sources:

“Wilkes Pain and Addiction Speech Presentation,” slides from “The Other Side of the Opioid Epidemic: The Crisis of Untreated Pain and Unrelieved Suffering,” Pennsylvania Pain and Addiction Summit, April 24, 2026.

“Pain: The Silent Public Health Epidemic,” Journal of Primary Care and Community Health, May 14, 2024.

“They Live in Constant Pain, but Their Doctors Won’t Help Them,” The New York Times, August 17, 2023.

“Chronic pain patients struggle to get opioid prescriptions filled, even as CDC eases guidelines,” CNN Health, March 17, 2023.

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