Pain treatment as a human right

Thursday, 27 January 2011 13:14

Last week, IFHHRO organised a two-day workshop in the Netherlands on pain treatment and the right to health.

The purpose of the workshop was to bring together pain and palliative care specialists on the one hand and human rights experts on the other, and to review a draft resolution on pain as a human rights issue. The workshop is part of a broader initiative to fight human rights abuses in health-care settings. Pain and palliative care experts learned about the right to health and how to apply the human rights framework to the denial of pain treatment, and human rights experts explored the barriers that exist for access to pain treatment.

One of the problems that came to the fore is that many states have too strict regulations on the procurement, prescription and administration of opioids that are used for pain relief, such as morphine. Despite the fact that the World Health Organization has included morphine (and codeine) on its list of essential medicines, opioids used for pain treatment are still not widely available. If they are available, there are often strict rules on who can prescribe them, who should administer them, in what dose and with what intervals. As a result, many people around the world in need of pain relief unnecessarily suffer from untreated pain.

It is important that national associations of physicians take a stance and become more active in ensuring access to pain treatment for their patients. In the near future, a National Medical Association will take the IFHHRO resolution that was discussed in the workshop into consideration for submitting it to the World Medical Association, in order to be adopted globally by all National Medical Associations that are members of the WMA.