An Opioid Study So Bad That It Disproves Itself? – American Council of Science and Health – By Josh Bloom — January 23, 2019
A paper in JAMA Open Network tries to hop on the anti-opioid bandwagon but fails so badly that I had to stare at the screen in disbelief for a while.
The intent of the study is obvious – to let us know that more pharmaceutical money leads to more opioid prescriptions being written, which results in more OD deaths. Continue reading
A Dose of Truth about the Consequences of Opiophobia | HCPLive – 2010 – Joel S. Hochman, MD – Jan 2010
In this old article, the author picks apart a study from 2003 which became the backbone of the claims about hyperalgesia. It’s outrageous that a study from 17 years ago is determining our pain care (or lack thereof) today.
As this decade has progressed, some legal experts assumed that as a consequence of certain tort actions (cf. Bergman v. Chin), physicians would be compelled to treat pain effectively in compliance with the community standard of care.
The “community standard of care” no longer exists for pain control because opiophobia is preventing the use of the most effective medication just because some “street drugs” of the same chemical class, like heroin or illicit fentanyl, are being abused by people who then overdose. Continue reading
Life after opioids: ‘I went home and cried for a long time. I felt really stupid’ | Australia news | The Guardian – by Celina Ribeiro – Feb 2020
Ms. Ribeiro has written an excellent two-part article on our plight:
For people managing chronic pain, the push to reduce opioid prescription has left them feeling lost and unsupported.
…and with untreated, extreme, and suicide-inducing pain.
Louisa O’Neil inhales deeply when she is asked about her history of pain. Then, dispassionately, like recalling a string of part-time jobs, she lists the history of surgeries, injuries, accidents and conditions that have rendered her in a near permanent state of pain for the past 16 years. Continue reading
Coronavirus ‘Hits All the Hot Buttons’ for How We Misjudge Risk – The New York Times –By Max Fisher – Feb 2020
I see a striking similarity between fear of the coronavirus and fear of opioid addiction.
Like everywhere else on campus, and in much of the world, the coronavirus was all anybody could talk about. But one of the attendees, a public health student, had had enough. Exasperated, she rattled off a set of statistics.
The virus had killed about 1,100 worldwide and infected around a dozen in the United States. Alarming, but a much more common illness, influenza, kills about 400,000 people every year, including 34,200 Americans last flu season and 61,099 the year before.
So the 80,000 flu deaths I previously cited from the 2017-2018 winter flu was unusual, but not entirely out of the norm. Continue reading
Study Finds Medical Student Bias Against Pain Patients – Pain Medicine News – by Michael Vlessides – Feb 2020
Are medical students biased toward patients with chronic pain? If the results of a single-center survey can be generalized to the nation as a whole, the answer seems to be a resounding yes.
Researchers at Michigan State University found that medical students had more negative perceptions of patients with chronic pain in terms of their health, self-care, self-discipline and compliance.
The students believed that patients with chronic pain would require greater patience and be more annoying than patients without chronic pain. Continue reading
Damaging State Legislation Regarding Opioids: The Need To Scrutinize Sources Of Inaccurate Information Provided To Lawmakers – free full-text /PMC6857667/ – Nov 2019
Lawmakers are making laws on the basis of inaccurate information provided by persons without expertise in chronic pain management.
The whole country is awash in PROPaganda spread by those who do not understand, much less experience themselves, the extreme physical limitations, subsequent mood disorders, negative social impact, and unnecessary suffering caused by constant unrelieved pain.
On January 22, 2019, a Massachusetts State Representative introduced House Bill 3656, “An Act requiring practitioners to be held responsible for patient opioid addiction”. Continue reading
In Defense of the Concept of Addiction – by Stanton Peele – Jan 2020
The term—and concept of—“addiction” is regularly frowned upon or even attacked by people in our field. But it won’t disappear, nor should it. There are four groups or schools of thought that de-emphasize or disparage “addiction.” And their reasons for doing so all have value.
Psychiatry:
Psychiatry in the latest DSM-5 claims it didn’t want to stigmatize people with the term “addiction”, so it completely muddled the difference between doing something regulated and appropriate on a regular basis (taking prescription opioids) versus binging on street drugs (heroin, amphetamines, cocaine), becoming addicted, and ending up overdosing. Continue reading
Even 6 months ago, it was becoming clear that overdoses aren’t “caused by opioids”, but rather all kinds of drugs, of which illicit opioids like fentanyl undoubtedly play a huge part.
But they are still trying to link all the overdoses to opioids using the most inside-out reasoning (if it can even be called that) that’s clearly influenced by PROPaganda.
The number of Americans dying from drug overdoses has risen rapidly, but the contribution of nonopioid drugs to this growth is not well understood.
And it won’t be understood until they clear their heads of the nonsense they’ve been flooded with. Continue reading
Though the subject here is opioid addiction, I’m amazed and delighted to find this publication for medical professionals repudiating the assumed link between opioid prescribing and addiction.
The current opioid crisis is the third one observed in the United States. This latest trend is, however, the result of unusual factors and has had some unique effects.
Knee-jerk reactions to restrictions on opioid prescriptions have resulted in an increase in the narco-trafficking of heroin and fentanyl, and as the consumption of opioids shifted from oral intake to injections, hepatitis B and C and HIV infections have increased. Continue reading
The fabricated distinction between cancer pain and non-cancer pain is often used to argue that opioids are only effective for the first, but not effective for all other chronic pain.
This never made sense to me, so I researched it trying to find the basis for the much-hyped difference between the two and discovered this distinction is a complete myth.
Below are 4 previous posts covering scientific articles (including NIH/PMC and Cochrane reviews) questioning the legitimacy of regulating and restricting the treatment of non-cancer pain differently than cancer pain.
Cancer vs Noncancer Pain: Shed the Distinction Continue reading
EDS and Chronic Pain News & Info 