Should health care facilities have the power to make lifestyle decisions for you -- and punish you when your choices don't measure up to their ideals?
More and more hospitals are making exactly
those kinds of decisions when it comes to people who choose to use marijuana -- even legal patients in medical marijuana states. Apparently, these places don't mind looking exactly as if they have more loyalty to their Big Pharma benefactors than they do to their own patients.
A new policy at one Alaska clinic -- requiring patients taking painkilling medications to be marijuana free -- serves to highlight the hypocrisy and cruelty of such rules, which are used at more and more health care facilities, particularly the big corporate chains (the clinic in question is a member of the
Banner Health chain).
Tanana Valley Clinic, in Fairbanks, started handing out prepared statements to all chronic pain patients on Monday, said Corinne Leistikow, assistant medical director for family practice at TVC, reports Dorothy Chomicz at the
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.
"We will no longer prescribe controlled substances, such as opiates and benzodiazepines, to patients who are using marijuana (THC)," the statement reads in part. "These drugs are psychoactive substances and it is not safe for you to take them together." (This statement is patently false; marijuana has no known dangerous reactions with any other drugs, and in fact, since
marijuana relieves chronic pain, it often makes it possible for pain patients to take smaller, safer doses of opiates and other drugs.)
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| Banner Health |
| LIAR, LIAR: Corinne Leistikow, M.D. says "patients who use opiates and marijuana together are at much higher risk of death." We'd love to see the study you're talking about, Corinne. |
"Your urine will be tested for marijuana," patients are sternly warned. "If you test positive you will have two months to get it out of your system. You will be retested in two months. If you still have THC in your urine, we will no longer prescribe controlled substances for you."
TVC patient Scott Ide, who takes methadone to control chronic back pain, also uses medical marijuana to ease the nausea and vomiting caused by gastroparesis. He believes TVC decided to change its policy after an Anchorage-based medical marijuana authorization clinic spend three days in Fairbanks in June, helping patients get the necessary documentation to get a state medical marijuana card.
"I'm a victim of circumstance because of what occurred," Ide said. "I was already a patient with her -- I was already on this regimen. We already knew what we were doing to get me better and work things out for me. I think it's wrong."
Ide, a former Alaska State Trooper, said he was addicted to painkillers, but medical marijuana helped him wean himself off all medications except methadone.
Leistikow admitted that the new policy may force some patients to drive all the way to Anchorage, because there are only a few chronic pain specialists in Fairbanks. Still, she claimed the strict new policy was "necessary."
The assistant medical director is so eager to defend the clinic's new policy that she took a significant departure from the facts in so doing.
"What we have decided as a clinic -- we're setting policy for which patients we can take care of and which ones we can't -- patients who use opiates and marijuana together are at much higher risk of death, abuse and misuse of medications, of having side effects from their medications, and recommendations are generally that patients on those should be followed by a pain specialist," Leistikow lied.
Patients who use opiates and marijuana together are NOT in fact at higher risk of death, abuse, misuse and side effects; I invite Ms. Leistikow to produce any studies which indicate they are. As mentioned earlier, pain patients who also use marijuana are usually able to use smaller, safer doses of painkillers than would be the case without cannabis supplementation.
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