I don't blame the doctors either. My pain doctor was a rural boy from my hometown who made good, graduated from Berkeley and finished medical school and finished desirable postdocs at Harvard. He simply straight up quit pain management as a specialty rather than be forced to provide his patients with what he considered subpar care. The loss of doctors like him hurts particularly badly, as it leaves us with pain specialists who either knowingly ignore the decades of successfully treated patients who used opioids or the remaining (and they do still exist) pill mill operations, who have simply gotten more sophisticated in their execution. Regardless of which doctor archetype chronic pain patients end up with, they're going to suffer.
