Pain management: Tulsa shooting exposes threats doctors face

The deadly mass shooting at an Oklahoma medical office by a man who blamed his surgeon for continuing pain following an operation on his back underscores the escalating threat of violence doctors have faced in recent years.

Michael Louis, 45, fatally shot Dr. Preston Phillips and three other people in Tulsa on Wednesday before killing himself. Police said Louis had been calling the clinic repeatedly complaining of pain and that he specifically targeted Phillips, who performed his surgery.

“What we currently know is that Louis was in pain, Louis expressed that he was in pain and was not getting relief and that was the circumstance surrounding this entire incident,” Tulsa Police Chief Wendell Franklin said at a news conference.

Doctors have been increasingly threatened with or become victims of violence by patients complaining of pain, especially in recent years when they have prescribed alternatives to opioids and tapered patients off addictive painkillers. Police have not said that Louis was seeking opioids to relieve his pain.

More than two-thirds of pain specialists surveyed during a violence education session at a 2019 American Academy of Pain Medicine meeting said a patient threatened them with bodily harm at least once a year. Nearly half said they had been threatened over opioid management.

“We only become aware of it when these dramatic and tragic events occur,” said Dr. W. Michael Hooten, a former president of the academy and a professor at the Mayo Clinic. “Some of the lower level threats and lower level occurrences of violence, we're simply not aware of them because they don’t get the attention.”

A jury in Minnesota began deliberations Thursday against Gregory Paul Ulrich, who was charged in the 2021 health clinic shooting that left one person dead and four injured. Investigators have said...