Pitching Relief: A Physician With Firsthand Knowledge About Pain Advocates Opium-Based Drugs Despite Fears of Abuse

Pitching Relief

A Physician With Firsthand Knowledge About Pain Advocates Opium-Based Drugs Despite Fears of Abuse

By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 23, 2006

Howard Heit knows pain.

He lives it, he studies it, he works to reduce it. His own pain used to get so bad that he wore patches of hair off the back of his head by rubbing it hard against walls in a desperate effort to get some relief.

"What I was feeling was like a cramp in my leg, but multiply that by 100 times and make it continuous," he now says. He no longer hurts like that, but he still wears a brace with a head attachment he can push against for acupressure when a pain spasm hits.

Heit is a doctor. Today he's a pain and addiction specialist in Fairfax, but once he was an up-and-coming gastroenterologist, a football player, a jock. That was before his auto accident, the one that changed his life and taught him about pain problems the very hard way -- as a patient who often didn't get the help he so badly needed.

The doctor still spends a lot of time in his wheelchair, but that hasn't stopped him from becoming a prominent practitioner and lecturer over the past decade. More recently, his profession and personal history have propelled him to the center of a contentious national dispute that he virtually personifies.

On one side, the Drug Enforcement Administration and Justice Department -- alarmed by the seemingly widespread diversion of opium-based prescription drugs such as OxyContin and Dilaudid to addicts and abusers -- have investigated, arrested and prosecuted as "drug dealers" scores of pain doctors who allegedly misused their authority to write prescriptions for narcotic painkillers. On the other side, many pain doctors and patients have protested the DEA's approach as overly aggressive and punitive, saying that it's unfairly penalizing pain patients.

Heit, 61, doesn't use prescription opioids for his own pain now, but he does prescribe them in high doses to many of his patients, and he's seen the drugs (in conjunction with proper monitoring) provide remarkable relief -- the kind he still wishes he had had available back when he really needed it. As the showdown between pain doctors and prosecutors stiffened several years ago, he felt obliged to get more actively involved in defense of opioid treatment despite the potential risk to his practice.

So he joined a team of 18 pain and addiction specialists, hospice and cancer-care workers and DEA officials to write and review guidelines for the proper prescribing of narcotics. He was delighted when, after more than two years of work, their Frequently Asked Questions presentation was posted on the DEA Web site in the summer of 2004. But several weeks later the FAQs disappeared from the site and was soon essentially repudiated by the agency, leading 30 state attorneys general to write to the agency in protest. The chill in the world of pain management has grown worse ever since.

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