First Opinion is STAT’s platform for fascinating, illuminating, and provocative articles concerning the life sciences writ giant, written by biotech insiders, well being care employees, researchers, and others.
To encourage sturdy, good-faith dialogue about points raised in First Opinion essays, STAT publishes chosen Letters to the Editor obtained in response to them. You possibly can submit a Letter to the Editor right here, or discover the submission type on the finish of any First Opinion essay.
The story
“The DEA’s 2025 quotas for opioids will depart critically unwell sufferers in ache,” by Rebecca Rodin
The response
As a persistent ache affected person (degenerative disc illness and polyarteritis nodosa), I’ve skilled the anguish and degradation of being denied ache medicine firsthand. Throughout the pandemic, I misplaced my major care doctor to retirement. It took two full years of pleading my case with quite a few medical “professionals” earlier than I lastly discovered one keen to prescribe the opioid which permits me to have even a semblance of a high quality of life. Certainly, we will and should do higher. For all of you on the market, alone and struggling in silence, I not solely really feel your ache, I urge you to not despair however as an alternative, enable righteous indignation to stand up inside you, for it can renew your sense of goal and it’ll enable you to combat off the despair that every one too typically plagues the chronically stricken. Let your elected officers know by calling them after hours and leaving heartfelt messages that may rightly put them on the spot for this grave social/medical injustice.
— Gregory Apelian
The response
I’m a 100% disabled veteran. I’ve been on opioid remedy from the VA for over 12 years for intractable ache and prone to be on it for the remainder of my life. The notion that my high quality of life could also be critically impacted due to some arbitrary quota set by a bureaucrat on the DEA is unacceptable. I’ll be sending this essay to my congressman and senator urging them to require the DEA to justify this motion.
— Jesse Brown
The story
“The really useful girls’s well being screening that not often occurs,” by Milena M. Weinstein and Samantha J. Pulliam
The response
Kudos to Dr. Weinstein and Dr. Pulliam for addressing a widespread girls’s well being challenge that’s minimized by too many male urologists as a nuisance relatively than as a driver of accelerated morbidity. I buried my mom in August after she expired of “previous age,” however the reality is that urinary incontinence was what led to her decline. Initially, she was embarrassed and reluctant to just accept social invites the place she wouldn’t have entry to privateness to alter the cumbersome grownup diapers she carried in her purse. Ultimately, she declined to go even to her grandsons’ houses as a result of incontinence would make the 20-minute trip disagreeable. Earlier than lengthy, my mother was housebound regardless of appointments with no fewer than 5 male urologists over a two-year interval. Please proceed this crucial work, in order that nobody else has to spend their first vacation season unnecessarily with out their beloved one.
— Debra Rothbard
The story
“The ‘pores and skin within the recreation’ strategy to well being care spending has failed,” by Merrill Goozner
The response
Lastly, a rational and well-informed article on American well being care. Thanks.
— Sharon Johnson
The story
“How ADHD wired me for scientific discovery,” by Jeff Karp
The response
Regardless that I can recognize his view on ADHD, as a fellow tutorial who additionally has ADHD, I strongly dislike any try and image the situation as one thing good, a “superpower” of kinds. Life with ADHD is a battle for hundreds of individuals all around the globe; it’s actually troublesome to form and conform into the neurotypical world when you find yourself neurodiverse — a paradigm additionally encompassing autism, dyslexia, and different psychological problems. Jeff is actually a singular particular person who managed to succeed regardless of the immense burden of the situation; he’s maybe too nearsighted to understand that he doesn’t represents the typical. He won’t even know what that common is.
— Matheus Zytkuewisz
