*****Resources From Fifty Years of Writing******
Richard Lawhern
Subject Matter Expert in public policy for regulation of opioid pain relievers and physicians who prescribe them. 28 years experience and thousands of contacts in social media support groups for people in pain.
Richard A Lawhern PhD.
For Friends, Clinician and Advocate Colleagues,? Editors and Media Reporters:
This note is distributed to all members of my multiple mailing lists, and across multiple social media platforms.? I have added several asterisks (****) to the title so readers might find it again after a few years, by doing a search on their retained email and bookmark files.? I suggest that you put it somewhere you can find it again when you want something else that I've written, when online search engines haven't produced what you want.?
This note has two purposes.?? First, I want friends and colleagues to have access to the very large body of work I have written and published.? Second and perhaps more subtly, I want to leave a "legacy" of information for others to mine at their leisure on quite a wide variety of subjects.? If this isn't useful to you right now, then simply put it away for a rainy day.
However, I ask you not to regard this as simply "Red tooting his own horn".? Two of my life-level mottoes have long been (and I believe them)
"It's Not About Me"
and
"You Are Not Alone".
Much of my writing has been offered as a community service for people in pain and to others who struggle with life issues. I've been writing as what might be called "an Internet Village Elder" in multiple online venues for more than 35 years.? I have also never taken a dime for or attempted to "monetize" the many thousands of hours I have spent in this work, though some others do.? I have spent a good bit of my own money in related travel and/or publication fees of "Open Access" journals. ? Hopefully this investment adds to the credibility of what I write.
I don't think I need to defend myself or my work.? Things that I've written can stand or fall on their own merits and I get plenty of feedback confirming that my papers are well written and solidly grounded upon science or pertinent personal experience. Though I have posted or published a large body of personal opinion, I have always been careful to distinguish between my own opinions (however well informed) versus objective facts (verified against multiple independent sources).
In this, I believe I am somewhat unique in the several fields where I've published.? Apart from the very high volume, much of the work itself has been peer reviewed by a network now numbering over 70 clinical professionals in pain medicine, addiction medicine, psychology, psychiatry, public health policy or law -- before ever being submitted to a journal or mass media editor for consideration.? I doubt that any other published author can say the same.
I write this at age 80.? Although I am in relatively good health, I won't live forever and there is a history of stroke and heart failure in my grandparents.? That doesn't worry me, but at this stage of my life I would like to leave a legacy for others to build upon in their own lives and publications. Thus, this review.? Think of it as an exercise in "now what would Red have said about so-and-so?"
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During the most recent 27 years of my life, a lot of my "stuff" has been directed to public health policy concerning treatment of chronic pain and addiction.? As I've written in several venues, I'm convinced that everything US and State governments think they know about these subjects is flat out wrong on both facts and ethics. At least arguably, a lot of it is knowingly fraudulent or the authors of it were grossly incompetent and biased.??
Though I'm careful about advocating for conspiracy theories, the pattern of financial self-interest and misrepresentation that I see among anti-opioid zealots seems simply too consistent and too widespread to be an accident.?? I perceive that a deliberate (and fraudulent) effort has been made to bury patient and doctor protests in a blizzard of bullshit.? I suspect — though in fairness,? I cannot definitively prove a trail of breadcrumbs — that a lot of people have been bought off by health insurance companies that regard chronic patients as "loss leaders" who eat into profits... and must therefore be killed off by any means fair or foul.? This is called "the war against people in pain" (and by some lay folks, "patient genocide"), and I am not the only writer who uses that phrase in current literature.?
If you want to read or view my healthcare policy related "stuff", then here are places where you might start:
The Perplexity.ai search engine characterizes my recent work as follows (and provides links to some of it):
My author page on America's most widely read and cited healthcare newsletter provides titles for almost 20 recent papers published there (KevinMD has over 200,000 unique readers every month):
Papers I have authored or coauthored have been cited over 250 times by other authors and are listed on google scholar, here:
The following work is among that of which I am most proud and which I believe have the greatest potential to change the face of American pain medicine:
??? A Training Session for Patient Advocates from which to brief State Pharmacy Boards, Medical Boards and Nursing Boards
??? An Indictment of US Public Health Policy on Pain Management
??? Two Opioid Crises - Problems, Causes, and Potential Solutions (with my friend and colleague Stephen E Nadeau, MD)
? ? Opioids and Chronic Pain: An Analytic Review of the Clinical Evidence (supporting Stephen E Nadeau MD)
??? Management of Chronic Non-Cancer Pain: a?Framework (supporting Stephen E Nadeau MD)
A Compendium of 23 Papers Critical of US Public Health Policy on Pain Management and Addiction
??????? (some of these papers are by other authors, but all are definitive, detailed, and deeply referenced to verifiable sources and evidence).
Among my earliest work in chronic pain are a fact sheet on Trigeminal Neuralgia at the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and a related fact sheet on Atypical Trigeminal Neuralgia still available on Wikipedia.? My work for the Trigeminal Neuralgia Association of the US (now rebranded as the Facial Pain Association) won an Aesculapius Award for Excellence in Web-Based Communications in year 2000. ===============
Nobody who makes a real difference in a field as complex as healthcare advocacy works alone — and nobody including me knows it all.? Other voices than mine are very active and credible.? Some of them speak from different perspectives than mine or deeper expertise.??
My closest colleagues can be contacted for follow-up on anything represented in my body of work:
Ashley Rogers [email protected]? Chronic pain patient and advocate in Pennsylvania
领英推荐
Barby Ingle [email protected]?Pain patient, author and VP-elect of International Pain Foundation. Jay Joshi MD [email protected]? Board certified pain management clinician and publisher, Daily Remedy.
Andrea Trescot MD, ?[email protected]?Past President, American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians
Jonelle Elgaway [email protected]? Executive Director, National Pain Council
Joseph Parker MD [email protected]?Board certified pain clinician, widely published healthcare writer
Kristen Ogden [email protected]??Patient advocate in Virginia and litigant in actions to defend a California doctor from DEA persecution.
Lawrence Peskin, PhD, JD, [email protected], Pain psychologist, Attorney
Louis Ogden [email protected]? Chronic pain patient and advocate, Virginia
Monty Goddard, PE, MSCE, [email protected]??Pain patient caregiver, patient advocate in California. Mark Ibsen MD [email protected]?35 years in emergency medicine.? Defendant in a multi-year unfounded persecution by the Montana Medical Board
Pat Irving M.Ed., RN [email protected]?Chronic pain patient and former National Leader for patient safety and risk education for the Kaiser Permanente. SME on National Opioid Settlement.
Stephen Nadeau MD [email protected]? 42 years behavioral
Joining in our shared advocacy in December 2024 are Patrick? ([email protected]) and Nicole O'Donnel,? ([email protected])
Other names with related messages are also deserving of your investigation and support — even though I differ from some of them in the positions that I personally support:
?? Claudia Merandi ("Doctor Patient Forum" on Facebook)
?? Norm Clemens, DPharm, "You Are Within The Norms"
?? Cindy Fleishman, US Pain Foundation
?? Pat Anson, editor, "Pain News Network"
?? Josh Bloom, Ph.D. "American Council on Science and Health"
?? Steve Arens, "Pharmacist Steve"
?? Forest Tennant, MD (again see Facebook)
?? Linda Cheek "Doctors (and Patients) of Courage" on Facebook
?? Nora Volkow, MD, Director US National Institute on Drug Abuse (one of the few sane voices in public health policy and the science of addiction)
?? Kate Nicholson, JD, prominent civil rights lawyer and chronic pain patient/
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Beyond my work in chronic pain advocacy, I have been a writer and commentator for over 50 years, primarily on what is now called "social media", but beginning before that term became widely known.? Some of my earliest postings can be found in the archives of USENET from the 1990s.? I have spoken on quite a wide variety of subjects: ??
US Military Affairs: I served 21 years on active duty as a USAF officer, retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel (Colonel Select) in 1988.? Much of that time I worked in positions dealing with sensitive technologies and programs related to National military intelligence, space-based surveillance systems,? strategic nuclear attack detection and assessment, and intelligence collection systems of many types.? For those who understand the alphabet soup, I once held clearances at TS-SCI/SI/TK/G, Q, SIOP-ESI Cat 1 and Cat 3, CREEK RAINBOW and sub-compartments, and other SCI programs never acknowledged publicly.?
If you encounter the term "Special Activity Squadron" on the Internet, be aware that such organizations can be thought of as "Spook Shops".? You won't see much publicly about what they do.? I served three and a half years in the 7113th SAS (now defunct).
? US and International Defense Aerospace?technology programs (22 years) with extensive travel in the US, UK, France, northern Europe, Abu Dhabi and Australia. I served several years as an Intelligence Systems Architect under contract to the US National Reconnaissance Office, working to coordinate procurement programs across multiple US intelligence agencies.? In my spare time, I was a peer reviewer for one of America's most prominent journals in systems engineering, specializing in very large scale "systems of systems" architectures and network-centered warfare.
?I have delivered short courses on "Cyberspace for Analysts" and "Survival Unix" for market research analysts, fourth grade teachers, University professors and beginning network administrators.
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On the less "military" side, I've been talking with youth and young adults online since the early 1990s.? These conversations have ranged from religion to politics to healthcare to graduate education to relationships and the meaning of life.?
I have been active in multiple interest groups of Quora.com?since October 2019.? During that time, things I've posted have been downloaded 6.2 million times and up-voted 65,000 times as of this morning. Two of the most upvoted pieces pertained to??
????? (a) an incident in which I counseled an attractive female employee that she was shooting herself in the foot professionally by wearing overly distracting clothing to work in a male-dominated corporation, and
????? (b) an incident on a pistol range in which a 12-year-old checked the number of rounds remaining in his Saturday night special by turning the gun and looking down the barrel... with his finger inside the trigger guard.? Go figure.? I never cease to be amazed at the power or persistence of simple human folly.
My Quora profile and postings can be accessed here:? https://www.quora.com/profile/Red-Lawhern
I've also written on much more personal subjects in even greater volume.? Typing at 125+words per minute certainly helped.? My autobiography (written in my 40s) for the first half of my life is available online as an unpublished manuscript:?
?Journeys of a Commoner
I have also written a cycle of 13 novels of which four were self-published on Kindle in the 1990s.? They never got serious sales because either (a) they weren't quite good enough, or (b) I never had time to promote them seriously.? I'm inclined to the view that (a) is closest to the truth. It is not for nothing that my long-suffering wife sometimes refers to herself as a "computer widow."? I could not have accomplished whatever I have without her active support over the 45 years of our marriage.
Thus ends this synopsis of fifty years of writing.?? Put it to good use for your own purposes.? Or not.? It's up to you.
Sincerely yours,
Clinical Pharmacist (Retired)
2 个月Allow me to add another thought: "Never Stop Pushing!" Once the 1st hurdle is cleared there is still a race.to run. This is an important marathon.
Retired at self-emplyed
2 个月Legacy Time; no one can avoid it even if they try. Look at all you’ve got to show for it, though! ?? ?? ??