By Ed Coghlan.

When you speak to chronic pain patients who use opioids to manage their pain, often you’ll hear the lament of “why aren’t the media telling our story?”

While there have been exceptions, most of the “mainstream media” (as some call it) have focused most of their attention on the addiction angle of the opioid “crisis”.

Well, the nation’s most influential newspaper wants to know what you think about the opioid crisis.

The New York Times is running a survey to find out what people want in the coverage of the opioid issue.

Let us suggest you take it:

Take the New York Times Survey.

One of our readers suggested to us this weekend that promoting this survey to the chronic pain community could help get the chronic pain patient and provider point of view in front of the paper – and perhaps influence their coverage.

Seemed like a good idea.

For the record, we took the survey ourselves and tried to communicate to the Times that it could do a better job of remembering that millions of chronic pain patients are using opioids and that the anti-opioid group fails the patient by not recommending alternative therapies—or in other words, they don’t even acknowledge this question:

“If you’re going to eliminate opioids, what is the treatment alternative you recommend for the millions of chronic pain patients who use opioids responsibly?”

As 2018 gets underway, getting the media to look at the whole story of the “opioid controversy” seems like a good resolution.

This is your chance to influence the narrative.

One piece of advice.

Be concise.

In the commentary section of The National Pain Report, our readers – the chronic pain patients often will write in great detail and blow off steam. That’s understandable.

Not sure that will be effective in this survey.

Be clear, declarative, and concise.

One more thing:

Let us know if you hear back from them.

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