Amanda Votta is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Brown University located in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. Her academic research explores the effects of social, legal and medical conceptions of beneficial versus detrimental drug use. Her work looks at how opioid prescribing policy and law define these concepts and are interpreted by clinicians and chronic pain sufferers. She also explores how those who experience chronic pain access opioids for pain management, or don't, in an era where that access has become uncertain. She looks at the multiple ways that chronic pain sufferers lives have been transformed due to increased restrictions on opioid prescribing. How they are finding, or rebelling against, new ways of navigating medical care and everyday life. How they are organizing to alter opioid prescribing policy and law they see as detrimental to their well being.
Health disparities. Access to care. Substance use. Chronic illness and pain.