(Image: Mitchell Squire/Private Media)

As the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) moves to limit access to another form of pain relief, with the encouragement of taxpayer-funded public health lobbyists and their media supporters, yet again the views of millions of pain sufferers are being ignored by health bureaucrats.

As with the successful effort by the public health lobby to ban over-the-counter codeine in 2016, rare cases of self-harm — in this case, paracetamol overdoses by teenagers — are being used to prevent Australians from managing their own pain, condemning chronic pain sufferers, women with severe menstrual pain and arthritis sufferers to ever greater difficulties in managing their pain.

In a demonstration of exactly how this is part of a longer-term, creeping attempt by bureaucrats and the public health lobby to take away Australians’ ability to manage their own pain, the justification for banning over-the-counter codeine in 2016 was that paracetamol was just as good as codeine and was widely available.

In fact, the “independent modelling” used to justify banning codeine specifically assumed “the substitution of low dose codeine medicines to cheaper supermarket products such as paracetamol and/or ibuprofen”. In fact, it had to, because otherwise the modelling would have shown a massive impact on demand for GPs as pain sufferers were forced to attend their GPs to receive prescriptions for low-dose codeine.

Now the very justification for the codeine ban is being removed with strict limits on supermarket purchases of paracetamol and ibuprofen — and a complete ban on the over-the-counter sale of modified-release paracetamol. The next step, inevitably, will be the complete prohibition of over-the-counter pain relief.

It is typical of this public health regulatory process that pain sufferers are ignored and their needs and agency diminished. The fact that women suffer from chronic pain significantly more than men according to both international and Australian studies suggests an element of perhaps unconscious misogyny in the willingness of public health advocates to dismiss the concerns of chronic pain sufferers.

But as lobby group Pain Australia pointed out in its submission to the TGA, the proposed restrictions will disproportionately punish pain sufferers in regional areas, where there are far fewer options not merely for access to GPs and chemists but to supermarkets as well.

The specific intent of the restrictions is to prevent “stockpiling” of paracetamol, yet stockpiling is exactly what pain sufferers without easy access to either pharmacies or supermarkets need to do to be able to effectively manage pain — and if you rely on modified-release paracetamol and you live in a regional community, you’ll be on your own. You’ll be forced to make an appointment with a hard-pressed local GP, perhaps days or weeks in the future, in order to obtain some basic relief. Good luck.

The obliviousness of the public health lobby to the realities of life for pain sufferers seems to be an abiding theme of their push to control Australians’ lives.

While minimising self-harm is the professed goal of the restrictions, they represent the ongoing medicalisation of the basics of life by the public health lobby. In the eyes of public health advocates, literally no decision you ever make cannot be turned into a medical issue that must be removed from your control and handed to a medical bureaucrat who is supposed to be better at making decisions for you than you yourself.

Pain relief, drug consumption, food, lifestyle choices: all must be vetted to ensure they maximise health and productivity for the community — even if not for you.

Do you feel big health is limiting your choices? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.