Word: paines
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Over the years, Quattlebaum's efforts have won considerable support in Congress, but several attempts to pass a heroin bill have been defeated. This year she is closer than ever. The Compassionate Pain Relief Act would authorize the use of heroin over a four-year evaluation period for hospitalized terminal cancer patients. It has been approved at the committee level in the House, and a companion bill has been introduced in the Senate. The bills have the support of such diverse political leaders as conservative Republican Barry Goldwater of Arizona and liberal Democrat Henry Waxman of California...
...large, supporters have been persuaded by Quattlebaum's argument that heroin, which has been prohibited for use by U.S. doctors since 1956, is in many ways superior to morphine, the injectable narcotic most widely prescribed for cancer pain. According to Quattlebaum, heroin is faster acting because it is more soluble: "You can use half a cc of heroin, when you may have to use 20 times as much morphine." This is especially important in treating patients who are so emaciated that there is little muscle left in which to inject a drug, making a large shot extremely painful. Quattlebaum...
...heroin bill is opposed by the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, the Reagan Administration and numerous medical experts on pain. One reason, and a factor in the past defeat of such legislation, is fear that medicinal heroin will find its way from the hospital to the street. But the larger question is whether patients will really benefit from the drug. "The evidence would suggest that her oin is the great non-issue of our day," says Kathleen Foley, chief of the pain service at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Foley, who has testified...
Perhaps most disturbing to many pain researchers is the prospect of large amounts of federal money going toward the preparation of heroin for medicinal use. "If the money and heat generated on the heroin bill were spent on developing new drugs and educating doctors on how to use the drugs we al ready have, patients would be a lot better off," insists Dr. Michael Levy, director of palliative care at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. This view is shared by Dame Cicely Saunders, the English founder of the hospice movement, which popularized the use of heroin in Britain...
...walk across the expansive living room of his Mercer Island, Wash., home. He walks surprisingly quickly, despite the ar thritis and 22 operations that have left his left leg 1 Yi in. shorter than his right. He cannot stand for more than seven minutes at a time without great pain. Says...