Pain Relievers
Five years ago, Eva Duarte started the only palliative care hospital unit for adult cancer patients in her native Guatemala.
But in the beginning, she had little to offer them. The country’s strict and complicated drug laws made it practically impossible to fill the prescriptions that Duarte wrote — despite the condition of her patients, more than half of whom were admitted with a diagnosis of advanced cancer and in need of skilled pain management.
“I began from zero,” Duarte says.
The situation is not unusual. When the battle against cancer is all but lost, the journey to the end of life brings pain. In many countries, doctors don’t have access to inexpensive drugs such as morphine that can safely ease that suffering. Or they don’t prescribe morphine, fearing scrutiny and punishment from regulatory authorities that view it as no different from heroin, since both are in the same class of pharmacological drugs called opioids. Their patients come to believe that nothing more can be done, and, in time, only death brings an end to their agony.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 5.5 million people with terminal cancer and another million in the late stages of HIV/AIDS are not getting the pain relief that they desperately need.