Summary

Several chapters prior, Quinones explained how Dr. Russell Portenoy’s 1986 contribution to the medical journal “Pain” launched a debate that birthed a series of changes in the medical community that amounted to a revolution in terms of pain management. In his chapter, “The Landmark Study,” Quinones changes to an overtly critical position toward Portenoy and presumably other doctors and researchers who helped facilitate the pain revolution (107). Quinones credits Portenoy, specifically, with resurrecting Porter and Jick from a 1979 edition of the renowned New England Journal of Medicine; the first citation in his debate-sparking paper was the unfortunately and misleadingly titled “Addiction Rare in Patients Treated with Narcotics” (107). Buried in the NEJM’s paper archives, no one seemed to discover that Porter and Jick “was a one-paragraph letter to the editor, and not a scientific study” (108). Also, Porter’s findings were from an era in medicine...