Last May, I advised a trial of medical marijuana, because marijuana is known to ameliorate some of those symptoms. It is also nominally legal in Massachusetts where MT resides - except that the law enacted in 2013 has yet to be implemented due to bureaucratic resistance.
That's true despite the fact that one of the applicants for a dispensary licence is a former prosecutor and a former member of the United States Congress.
Medical marijuana will overcome entrenched resistance when enough people exert political muscle in the forward tide of history.
Meanwhile, my friend sits and suffers.
Medical marijuana has been usefully prescribed for a variety of debilitating illnesses inadequately treated with conventional medications, from glaucoma to the unremitting nausea of chemotherapy for cancer.
Here in New Zealand, the debate over medical marijuana has yet to begin - and if National's Chester Borrows has anything to say about it, it never will. Mr Borrows has expressed his position that there will be no move towards any decriminalisation of marijuana on his watch.
At least he is forthright about it, which is more than can be said of his ministerial colleague Peter Dunne who, as deputy Minister of Health, claims it's not the Government's role to provide medical marijuana but rather that those desperate enough to need it should apply to the pharmaceutical industry. What claptrap.
This disingenuous comment is made by someone who knows full well that the pharmaceutical industry will never provide medical marijuana because its ease of cultivation by private citizens means there is no ready profit to be made by Big Pharma.
Dunne and Borrows are together on this issue and rowing their boats against the tide of history.
When it comes to the retrogressive, Borrows has a less than admirable record.
He favoured shifting our maternity service to Palmerston North until forced to think otherwise by our marches.
In these pages he explained the conscience vote he cast against marriage equality as a reflection of his religious belief, forgetting that he was elected to represent all the citizens of the district and not just those who were his co-religionists.
I believe religion should first teach and endorse compassion which leads naturally to extending the full rights of citizenship to all adults, not just to some.
Compassion seems key to me in all this. It is feeling the pain of the schoolteachers whom Novopay short-changed and whom Chester told "to pull up (their) socks".
It is finding more to say to protesters against the secretly-negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement who are rightly fearful of the effect of foreign corporations on their lives, their jobs, their safety, other than an a confession of his own cynicism and an admonition to just "trust us".
If Chester and his cronies stay in power, the people here - like my pal MT in Massachusetts - are going to wait a long while for relief of their suffering.
Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.
