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Dr. Russell Portenoy and his mentor Dr. Kathleen Foley were important figures in America’s pain revolution in the latter half of the 20th century. Portenoy believed Palliative care—the treatment of pain in the seriously ill—to be “guided by moral issues of patient autonomy and respect for cultural and individual differences.” Throughout Portenoy’s career, his acceptance of opiates came from a place of well-intentioned moral integrity. He believed he was part of a revolution made possible by the technological advancements of the pharmaceutical industry. In 1986, Portenoy and Foley published a paper in the medical journal Pain that argued in favor of the normalization of opiates in pain medicine. Portenoy and Foley claimed that opiates weren’t inherently addicting, arguing instead that addiction was more dependent on the patients to whom opiates were prescribed. The paper would be used regularly by doctors and drug companies to defend the expanded use opiates in medicine. Portenoy was also one of the pain researchers who received funding from Purdue Pharma, and he would come to regard the company as an ally. He spoke regularly at conferences, urging doctors to explore innovative approaches to pain management, including the use of time-release opiates like OxyContin. Quinones portrays Portenoy as a complicated figure throughout Dreamland: his reasons for embracing OxyContin and other drugs like it were not inherently nefarious, but he allowed his message to be exploited and inflated by Purdue and may thus be seen as complicit in the effects of the opiate epidemic.
Dr. Russell Portenoy Quotes in Dreamland
The Dreamland quotes below are all either spoken by Dr. Russell Portenoy or refer to Dr. Russell Portenoy. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Part 1: The Pain
Quotes
The new discipline gave Russell Portenoy “the talking points I needed to mold my work life,” he once wrote. As an emerging discipline, palliative care appealed to the bright young doctor interested in staking out his own ideas. Comforting the seriously ill and dying touched on the altruistic reasons why anyone would enter medical school in the first place. […] Watching people struggle with pain, and talking to families who faced the loss of a loved one, gave Portenoy a touch of idealism, a bit of the crusader pushing up against conventional wisdom.
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Part 4: The Treatment Is You
Quotes
Katz admired Portenoy, who, he said, had spent a career searching for better ways to relieve his patients’ real and considerable pain. Portenoy had helped make pain a topic of research. Moreover, Portenoy was always clear that pain treatment needed balance and time; doctors needed to be selective in the patients who received this treatment. But “people want simple solutions,” Katz said. “People didn’t want to hear that and the commercial interests didn’t want to emphasize that.”
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Get the entire Dreamland LitChart as a printable PDF.
Dr. Russell Portenoy Quotes in Dreamland
The Dreamland quotes below are all either spoken by Dr. Russell Portenoy or refer to Dr. Russell Portenoy. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Part 1: The Pain
Quotes
The new discipline gave Russell Portenoy “the talking points I needed to mold my work life,” he once wrote. As an emerging discipline, palliative care appealed to the bright young doctor interested in staking out his own ideas. Comforting the seriously ill and dying touched on the altruistic reasons why anyone would enter medical school in the first place. […] Watching people struggle with pain, and talking to families who faced the loss of a loved one, gave Portenoy a touch of idealism, a bit of the crusader pushing up against conventional wisdom.
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Part 4: The Treatment Is You
Quotes
Katz admired Portenoy, who, he said, had spent a career searching for better ways to relieve his patients’ real and considerable pain. Portenoy had helped make pain a topic of research. Moreover, Portenoy was always clear that pain treatment needed balance and time; doctors needed to be selective in the patients who received this treatment. But “people want simple solutions,” Katz said. “People didn’t want to hear that and the commercial interests didn’t want to emphasize that.”
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