Thank you for your informative series on prescription drug abuse, which is undeniably a serious problem.

I would like to see you do an equally informative series on the flip side of the problem: people with a legitimate need for prescription medications for pain who are unable to obtain them because physicians are (understandably) reluctant to prescribe them.

The medical journals are full of articles about the mistreatment and undertreatment of chronic pain, but I'll bet you could easily find dozens of people to give you first-person stories. Even those who, like myself, have no interest whatsoever in using narcotics for chronic pain have difficulty finding a health care provider who will have a serious conversation about managing pain while juggling full-time work, home, care of elders, and all the other exigencies of daily life in the 21st century.

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