The Scourge Of Prescription Opioids (In The US)

RetiredNSmilin said:

I had a friend who had two DRs. One bottle she would sell and the other take. Once every two weeks she would get another bottle from one of them.
When I called that dr's office, I was told they basically did not care.

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Well, I'd be glad to know if I required painkillers, my doctor's office wouldn't stop medication simply because someone called them with allegations that I was a junkie....

Mr Person said:

Well, I'd be glad to know if I required painkillers, my doctor's office wouldn't stop medication simply because someone called them with allegations that I was a junkie....

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From what I've read in the Colorado State Pharmacy site, it's the Drs. who are responsible to evaluate, assess, etc. a patient's condition over time, andthen decide to continue, or to not continue the script(s).

They could call, but the Dr. 'basically does not care'. (RARE you'd get to speak / him/her directly anyway.)

No offence to taac, but that article is from 1946. I had accessed the entire article earlier for free, but now can't even sign in.


SO, here's a very recent article, and it has some eye-popping, (mind-boggling) numbers, and shows how the Drs' etc. (very suspicious) reporting system 'works'......err, it works well for the Drs. anyway-to the tune of 3.5 BILLION and this amount covers the period of August to December 2013...not to mention the USG, and the infamous ACA's role in this.

Snippet: "The launch of the so-called Open Payments website, mandated under a provision of the Affordable Care Act, was far from glitch-free: Some users encountered long delays and sometimes error messages trying to access its seven data tables. Also, the site didn’t provide consumers with an easy-to-use lookup tool, a single place to search for a doctor’s name and see all results across data files....."



A sub-title: "The government’s data on payments to doctors and hospitals by drug and device makers is incomplete and hard to penetrate – but here’s a first look."

Doctors Earn $3.5 Billion in Kickbacks from Pharmaceutical Companies

One more:

Doctors Influenced By Kickbacks, Overprescribe Painkillers, Studies Show - AboutLawsuits.com

Mr Person said:

Well, I'd be glad to know if I required painkillers, my doctor's office wouldn't stop medication simply because someone called them with allegations that I was a junkie....

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Good point. This makes perfect sense.
This would have been complete hearsay to them.

I had a doctor prescribe me lortabs when I had an ingrown toenail removed. The frequency with which they hand out these things is ridiculous.

Your Star said:

I had a doctor prescribe me lortabs when I had an ingrown toenail removed. The frequency with which they hand out these things is ridiculous.

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no kidding, all they gave me on the ship was four Tylenol #3's and one day's bed rest.
Oh, and a chit to wear tennis shoes with a hole in them for about a week.

That aside, Your Star, wasn't it a miracle of life to finally have all that pain go away and never come back.
I had been plagued by two big toe ingrowns for years.
It was like having a new lease on life.

At the risk of having this thread moved to CT, it is also a fact after the horrible Sandy hook massacre, two individuals independently started connecting the dots and made a connection link to several individuals who committed mass killings ALSO being on psych drugs.

Both were later found shot dead execution style.

The price of messing with BIG PHARMA.

(NO, I do not presently have any links, my apologies)

The scourge of opioids should be dealt with IMO just as the scourge of methaqualone was dealt with--by the manufacturers ceasing production of the drugs and withdrawing them from the market.

I do not think Big Pharma is principled enough to do it voluntarily, even as Coca Cola removed cocaine from the original recipe voluntarily, so the hammer of government regulation might be necessary.

Thoreau72 said:

The scourge of opioids should be dealt with IMO just as the scourge of methaqualone was dealt with--by the manufacturers ceasing production of the drugs and withdrawing them from the market.

I do not think Big Pharma is principled enough to do it voluntarily, even as Coca Cola removed cocaine from the original recipe voluntarily, so the hammer of government regulation might be necessary.

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I agree, but it's very unlikely to happen....quite a change from the 60's Heroin craze, like Steppinwolf's song, "Gdamn the Pusher" now the Drs. are the Pushers, and making serious $$ in the process, at the expense of the American ppl.

I'm sure Pharma is not principled enough, plz see this thread.

http://www.debatepolitics.com/healt...-cancer-and-give-big-pharma-untold-power.html

Your Star said:

I had a doctor prescribe me lortabs when I had an ingrown toenail removed. The frequency with which they hand out these things is ridiculous.

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My own personal story from a few years back....



The wife and I went to a restaurant we really wanted to return to, and this was the only night for a couple months that they had reservations. It was a Saturday. I felt a bit off beforehand and my cheeks felt slightly puffy, but nothing seemed too far out of the ordinary.

Half way through the meal, a stabbing pain grows in the lower left corner of my jaw. It gets to the point where I have trouble keeping up with conversation, and there's a very obvious growing swelling around my lower left jaw. Specifically, around a wisdom tooth that came 3/4 of the way in, not fully, but never presented a problem in 10+ years. Well, we can't very well raise a doc at 10 pm and I'm not in enough pain to go to the ER (neither is there any indication of an infection going septic at that point). So we go to an "urgent care center" the next day (which usually costs several grand less than a ****ing ER, billing be damned to hell for all eternity...)

By the time I was talking to the doc, it actually didn't hurt at all. I told them that the night before, that if breaking a bone counts as 10/10*, it was 6/10-8/ 10 the night before, that I'd treated it with 4 advil and - stupidly (don't do this at home) - a few glasses of whiskey on top. That sort of helped me sleep a couple hours. I stressed that I was in no pain whatsoever.

BUT, I also told them that despite the swelling was even greater the next day, I was in no pain whatsoever, I just wanted a course of antibiotics to treat the obvious infection (it was between the tooth and gum. So yeah, some discomfort). They prescribed me the antibiotics. They also prescribed me 6 Vicodin.

Which, again, I had told them point-blank I didn't need in the first place.

/facepalm.



Fortunately, when I saw my dentist in a few days and explained all this, he did not decide to give me morphine.




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*Of course, the rating system for pain is absurd even if it is the best we can do. I once broke a finger, didn't tell anyone, and finished the wrestling season. That sucked. That's my 10. But I suspect if someone doused me in gas and light me on fire, that would become a 0.2 and being burned alive would become 10.

You can only rate pain against the vestiges of prior personal experience....