Thank you for using your set of skills to look out for people!
How can we challenge misinformation that is unwittingly spread by countless news organizations?
Since the Obama administration, the CDC, FDA and DEA unwittingly continues to mislead the public on opioid overdose by placing blame on prescription medication for the opioid epidemic. Prescription medication used to play a major role in opioid overdose deaths but after the government's swift response to the epidemic, by limiting healthcare access to opioids, heroin and fentanyl became the leading cause of opioid overdose.
This injustice has been allowed to continue because the media believes prescription medication is still at fault whereas the data collected by the government says otherwise.
it is apparent that overdose deaths from prescription drugs (9%) were dwarfed by those from heroin, fentanyl, or a mixture of both (85%). So, when a headlines says "There were 100 opioid overdose deaths last week," what it really means is that nine deaths were a result of pills, and 85 from heroin/fentanyl.
Palliative care patients have complained that some doctors have been more reluctant to prescribe opioid pain medications, even at the end of the life.
Six years ago, Lenny Estrada of Redmond had been undergoing treatment for malignant brain tumors, and despite outliving his initial prognosis, felt his quality of life was lacking. “He was in pain. He was miserable. He didn’t feel like he was living life to the fullest,” said his wife, Angela Estrada.
He went from his primary care doctor to his oncologist to his rheumatologist — eventually to seven different doctors treating him at the time, seeking help. “Everybody was hemming and hawing, not sure what to do,” Angela Estrada said. “Everybody was kind of nervous about giving pain medicine.”
Pharmacy chains are imposing bureaucratic barriers on filling prescriptions and denying prescription refills. The US Association of Attorney's General is lobbying US Insurance providers to revise their formularies to emphasize non-opioid medications in preference to opioids. The Veterans Administration has been directed by Congress to make the CDC prescription guidelines mandatory rather than voluntary. Hospitals and pain management practices all across America are discharging patients and forcibly tapering down the dose levels of those they retain.
The CDC's controversial but officially optional opioid prescription guidelines, which encourage doctors to be as stingy as possible with pain medication, seem to be getting more mandatory every day. The recommendations, which were published in March 2016, already have been imposed on veterans, incorporated into state laws, and adopted as a guide to proper medical practice by regulators, insurers, and doctors. Now the Trump administration plans to impose them on the 44 million Americans enrolled in Medicare, against the advice of critics who say that move will lead to needless suffering. Those critics include doctors who helped produce the guidelines.
DarthSvn6 karma
Thank you for using your set of skills to look out for people!
How can we challenge misinformation that is unwittingly spread by countless news organizations?
Since the Obama administration, the CDC, FDA and DEA unwittingly continues to mislead the public on opioid overdose by placing blame on prescription medication for the opioid epidemic. Prescription medication used to play a major role in opioid overdose deaths but after the government's swift response to the epidemic, by limiting healthcare access to opioids, heroin and fentanyl became the leading cause of opioid overdose.
Not only did heroin and fentanyl overdose increase but chronic pain patients and terminally ill patients lost access to pain medication as well. There is an ongoing humanitarian crisis where patients with debilitating conditions are denied life-changing - sometimes life-saving - medication because the DEA strong-armed doctors and pharmacists with the federal power to unexpectedly seize doctors' and pharmacists' licenses, freeze their assets and shut down their practice.
This injustice has been allowed to continue because the media believes prescription medication is still at fault whereas the data collected by the government says otherwise.
https://www.acsh.org/news/2016/11/03/have-opioid-restrictions-made-things-better-or-worse-10400
http://www.bendbulletin.com/localstate/6033839-151/opioid-limits-hit-hospice-cancer-patients
https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/10/12/opioid-epidemic-6-charts-designed-deceive-you-11935
https://reason.com/blog/2018/03/28/new-medicare-rule-promises-needless-suff
More info:
https://www.statnews.com/2017/02/24/opioids-prescribing-limits-pain-patients/
https://medium.com/@stmartin/neat-plausible-and-generally-wrong-a-response-to-the-cdc-recommendations-for-chronic-opioid-use-5c9d9d319f71#.ci3i05u8k
View HistoryShare Link