*** Now accepting applications for new patients to be seen at our new office located at the Sage Center for Wellness and Health at 10700 SW Beaverton Hillsdale Hwy, Park West Plaza, Bldg 3, Ste 560, in Beaverton, Oregon ***
Contact our office to get the process started and request your paperwork. The process can take a few weeks, so the sooner you get started, the sooner we may be able to help you.
If you are needing long-term pain management care that does not require injections or the care of implantable drug delivering devices or neurostimulators, Dr. George may be able to help you. If your pain medication regimen is strictly oral (pill or liquid) or topical (patches), then Dr. George may be able to provide you with local care at his office for your medications at a much more affordable rate and reduce your need for long distance travel and more expensive doctor visits.
With the CDC “Guidelines” of March 2016, more and more providers are refusing to prescribe long-term pain medications to their patients, especially new patients. Licensing boards are disciplining providers without telling the public exactly what they have done wrong; it seems more like a “witch hunt” to get rid of the providers they don’t “approve” of or the “troublemakers” that cause them grief. “Over-prescribing” is the term they use to attack these providers, but they refuse to actually provide a definition of the term!
More and more patients, chronic pain specialists, and pain associations are starting to fight back against the abuses being forced on legitimate pain patients who have never abused their medications. They are being lumped together with addicts who buy illegal drugs and who never had a prescription in the first place. Why don’t we “judge” all law abiding gun owners as members of some terrorist organization and go after them too? “They have a gun, so they must be terrorists” is the type of logic being applied to all pain patients by calling them “addicts” with legally obtained prescriptions!
I have reviewed medical records from providers and clinics all across this state and have found them to be very selective and discriminatory based on their own whims without true medical justification. They say “you” can’t have something, then turn around and give another patient what they just denied you. Often it’s because that patient has better insurance than you; if you have Oregon Health Plan or Medicare, then you most likely have been the victim of this abuse. Just because your insurance will not pay for a medication is no excuse to not prescribe it if the patient can afford it and the provider feels it is proper to use.
I can report that many providers have carelessly been prescribing opioids without following many of the recommendations that have long existed even before the CDC Guidelines came out. I have seen providers who never drug tested their patients for years, allowed them to abuse alcohol with opiates, wrongly interpreted their drug tests leading them to dismiss their patients, prescribed for months without ever seeing the patient, etc. More and more abuses due to the casual prescribing habits of providers who have no training in chronic opiate use and who refuse to get educated on these issues.
You would be amazed at the number of medical providers who lie about the continuing medical education that they “attend,” when they are actually out sightseeing, shopping, playing golf, etc. This is unethical and technically fraud, but medical boards continue to “overlook” it because it is so pervasive; even their own board members are guilty of it. I have personally witnessed physicians lying about attending required pain education classes, but the Oregon Medical Board and the national physician associations do nothing about it.
While I agree that some providers and patients have done things wrong, all patients and providers are suffering now for the mistakes of those few. Often those “few” are protected friends of the medical board officers that fail to discipline them but will go after others that complain about them.
With all that being said, I am doing my best to comply with the current CDC Guidelines and more. As a family practitioner who does attend multiple pain conferences each year, I stay up with the current literature. Pain specialists use physician assistants and nurse practitioners to see more and more patients and charge their higher rates and never see the patients themselves. Even though I do as much as some pain specialists do, and usually spend more time with my patients than they do, I am being gradually coerced by the Oregon Medical Board, the federal government, insurance companies, pharmacies, and other groups to decrease my prescribing habits. So even though a pain specialist is allowed to prescribe more than 90 MED (Morphine Equivalent Dosages) per day, family practitioners are told not to. So I am working my higher MED level patients slowly down to meet their criteria, and I will probably do the same if we accept you into my practice until the laws change to quit attacking chronic pain patients and their prescribers. If you are already below that 90 MED level, then we can probably help you continue on with your medications when you medical provider refuses to do so anymore.
You must first read about our office policies and complete your medical history questionnaire that Dr. George will review. You must provide us with the last two years worth of medical records from all medical providers you have been seeing, such as your current or last primary care provider, specialists, hospital, etc.
If your medical records show your repeated failure to follow prescribed dosing guidelines, missed appointments, abuse of medications or illegal drugs, failed drug tests (not counting medical marijuana), etc., then Dr. George will not accept you into his practice.
We will perform searches of your pharmacies and the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program to verify the medications that your are prescribed and more. We will do an Oregon State Police criminal background check to ensure that our potential patients have no drug abuse history that they have failed to report.
Once we have received all of the above information, Dr. George will then review it and decide whether or not to accept you into his practice. This process can take anywhere from two to four weeks or longer depending on how many providers you have seen. Many of those clinics delay providing your medical records to our office and that delays our review process. They choose to prevent you from getting care that they can’t control or don’t approve of. Some of those offices will go so far as to threaten you with the loss of care at their clinic if you have your records sent to our office, basically holding you hostage to their whims and discriminatory medical care.
We do far more than any other clinic that we know of in the screening of our patients. Other clinics say they will get your records, but usually don’t review them before they see you. Often times they are glad to see you for that first appointment, because it’s the most expensive. Then they claim that they can’t prescribe for you until the records come in; often times they never follow-up to get those records! We do what we do to ensure that when we accept you into our practice and schedule your first appointment, that Dr. George will be able to prescribe for you, if he feels it’s justified.
If you have been told by your past doctors that you can not use medical marijuana and prescription pain medications together because it is “illegal“, please realize that you have been lied to. There is NO federal or state law that prohibits any practitioner from prescribing controlled pain medications (opioids) to a patient currently enrolled in the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program. Most practitioners refuse to do so due to their own personal prejudices and some clinics have established policies that prevent practitioners from prescribing due to their irrational and unjustified fear of losing federal funding. Remember that money is more important to them than your healthcare. No federally funded clinic in the United States has ever lost its’ funding due to that ridiculous excuse. Many larger specialty care clinics allow marijuana use, some are even recommending it per their state guidelines.
If they would only open their eyes and see beyond their limited experiences, they would find that the majority of patients who use both cannabis and opioids properly, can keep their opioid dose at a lower rate for a longer period than those who only use opioids. By keeping the opioid dose down, there are fewer current side effects and fewer long-term complications. Cannabis, particularly high-CBD or cannabidiol, works to enhance your pain relief and hopefully reduce your dependence on synthetic chemical pain relievers. Unfortunately, employers would rather you be medicated only with narcotics and alcohol, both of which they approve of, but not cannabis. Impairment should be the issue, not the drug itself. There are many functional alcoholics working at their jobs right now, but no one does anything about it.
If you have been told by doctors at other clinics like Umpqua Health, Aviva (Umpqua Community Health Center), South River Community Health Center, and others that they don’t treat chronic pain, then you have been lied to. They do treat chronic pain, just not yours. What it typically means is that you have Medicare or Oregon Health Plan. If you had a better paying commercial insurance plan, you would probably get your pain medication, but with government funded plans they don’t want to help you. I have seen numerous patients from each of these clinics and others that have almost identical health problems and yet one get pain medications and the other doesn’t. The only difference is the insurance plan! That’s treating their pocketbook and not your health! Remember that they typically lose money seeing government-insured patients, so they don’t want to spend any quality time with you. Yet that doesn’t stop them from claiming on the insurance bill that they spent more than double the time they actually did. Fraud is alive and well in the healthcare system, especially here in Douglas County. I see numerous chart notes with “cut and paste” statements that are just continuously the exact same wording month after month. The same applies with the physical examination. Patients tell me their provider hasn’t touched them in months, yet the documented section states all sorts of physical exam findings due to touching and listening. More fraud that does an extreme disservice to you, yet makes them more money for claiming they did it when they really didn’t.
Come experience a different type of care at Affordable Integrative Medicine with Dr. Darryl George and his staff.
