There are some injuries…such as a back injury, where the pain can be excruciating and it’s 24 hours a day. The patients place themselves in a doctors’ care for “pain management”. If what happens after is not for the patients’ best interest but proven in court to be for the medical community’s best financial interest, heads need to roll.
Addiction isn’t necessarily a bad thing. My mother has severe intractable pain, I don’t doubt for a minute she is addicted to her pain medication. So what? The alternative is living with severe pain. It’s not like we have effective non-addictive pain medications as a viable alternative. It only becomes a problem if someone takes away her legal access to the medication she needs.
I can’t argue that one either and if this is the best way to treat her pain, so be it. It’s when it isn’t the best way and for the medical community’s best financial interest that I’m addressing. As I said earlier, I don’t fully understand the issue but it needs to be addressed.
None of this would be an issue if Purdue had back in the early 2000’s done something about the addiction problem when it became apparent that OxyContin was being abused at a pretty high rate.
But that would have cut into profits… so they didn’t.
Less likely, doesn’t mean cannot be. Now if you want to talk about real criminal behavior. Let’s talk about how our government demands opioids be coupled with acetaminophen and why that is.
Although the inclusion of acetaminophen in the combination pain-killers is intended in part to deter abuse of mild opioids, ironically, for some pain patients it’s the ingredient that proves more dangerous.
In a statement, Sandra Kweder, MD, deputy director of the Office of New Drugs in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research said, “Overdose from prescription combination products containing acetaminophen account for nearly half of all cases of acetaminophen-related liver failure in the U.S., many of which result in liver transplant or death.”
Similar attempts to deter alcohol abuse during Prohibition by including poisonous chemicals in industrial alcohol that was being diverted for use by bootleggers resulted in the deaths of roughly 10,000 people; more recently, chemicals added to anti-anxiety and pain medications to prevent injection have instead resulted in limb amputations after the substances caused blood clots or other complications. ( More on Time.com:Suffer from Migraines? FDA Says Try Botox Injections)
How about that one? Our own governments plan to address abuse, was to make sure they had to add something that would kill you if you abused it. Now that’s criminal.
Still not sure why anyone would want to run cover for a corporation that knowingly sold a highly addictive and abused drug… covered it up and doubled down to sell even more
Strange to deflect to what you feel is bad government policy in order to whatabout this nonsense.
Marketing a drug that is highly addictive to treat moderate pain because the advertising claims that it is “less likely” to be abused while never doing the drug trials to back that claim up and then when the rampant abuse became apparent they not only did nothing to stop it but targeted those areas for further sales while covering up that they were doing it is the problem.
I still don’t know why some feel the need to run cover for this sort of corporate malfeasance.
They trained an army of pharmaceutical salespeople to mislead and lie to doctors. Even I remember the sentiment for quite awhile there that opiate painkillers, used correctly, by people in pain, could be used without addiction. That was a lie perpetuated by the pharma company.
