Medical Charities Face Barriers to Easing Patients’ Pain

The international aid charity Doctors Without Borders has been working to step up its ability to give pain medication to patients of the 10,000 surgeries the organization performs around the world, reports The New York Times.

Xavier Lassalle, the charity’s pain specialist, who led a five-year internal campaign to improve the group’s pain-management practices, said that for years, despite the best of intentions, the organization paid too little attention to the pain of those it helped.

The group’s record shows the challenges in getting desperately needed painkillers to many of the world’s poor. It is not solely a problem of logistics or money. It also it requires changing the way many doctors think — even those with the best of intentions, Mr. Lassalle told the newspaper.

Part of the problem in the past, he said, was that some doctors volunteering to work in war zones subconsciously held to the myths that Africans or Asians didn’t feel pain as intensely as Europeans or Americans did.

Furthermore, most countries forbid the importation of narcotics without government permission — which may be hard to obtain in the chaos of war or disaster.

As of early this year, said Mr. Lassalle, the situation has improved. Morphine or other painkillers are normally available wherever the charity sets up operations, and all patients are routinely asked to rate their pain on the zero-to-10 scale recommended by the World Health Organization.

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