AND THE PAIN CONTINUES, NEEDLESSLY, UNABATED
Still dragging on, months and years after it should have been exposed and destroyed, the horrendous abrogation of medical and legal ethics and responsibility that has cost the lives of thousands of innocent legitimate medical patients continues.
You may have heard discussions regarding how important it is to “reduce the number of opioid pain pills” being dispensed, presented as a fight against the pharmaceutical industry’s rampant greed, when in fact — first and foremost REDUCING THE NUMBERS OF PRESCRIBED PILLS HAS NOT ONLY NOT REDUCED OVERDOSE DEATHS — IT HAS INCREASED THEM.
How can that be?
What are all those people whose lives were happily functional with pain controlled successfully supposed to do when cut off from the medication that allowed them to live successfully contributing to their families and society? Just stop, as the liars, fools, cheats, and idiots would have you believe is somehow possible? If they’d only stop taking pain medication the pain would stop — does that make sense to you?
Of course not. The pain is unremitting and some resort to suicide. Some resort to trying to acquire pain relief any way they can, including trying to find substitute opioid relief on the streets. And given that these people have no experience with that world, and the innate instability of dosage and chemical makeup of what is being sold, they are often statistics waiting to happen.
Look at the data — with numbers of pills dropping by huge number, have overdose deaths decreased? NO, they have INCREASED. The CDC’s own data show as much. Given that this has gone on for years now, you might think someone would consider changing the policy that has caused so much unnecessary pain and misery in the lives of innocent medical patients. But, no, instead they are redoubling efforts to continue and increase the policy.
Why would this be? As they say, follow the money. Who benefits by this vast reduction of prescribed medication? EASY — the Insurance companies that were being forced to pay the inflated prices of the pharmaceutical industry for LEGITIMATE medical treatment.
Maybe its ignorance, maybe its financial self-interest, but shills for the insurance industry have made the reduction of opioid analgesic treatment a false measure of merit in this so-called “opioid crisis”. In reality, these reductions signal the systemic failure of American pain medicine. And physicians have made themselves accessories to this failure by refusing to stand up publicly for their patients. And the consequences of this national policy misdirection for millions of people have been and continue to be literally deadly.
Opioid therapy is and has been safe and effective for millions of people who are now being forced to live and die in agony. This fraudulent so-called opioid “epidemic” is a political mythology invented by the CDC at the urging of Andrew Kolodny and his ironically named PROP — “Physicians for (Ir)Responsible Opioid Prescribing”. Or one might say PROPs of the Insurance Industry.
Because remember, every pill less prescribed is additional profit for those who would otherwise have had to pay for the legitimate medication of those who have paid to have insurance coverage for just such necessary medical treatment. And thanks to the bogus festival of political histrionics and the melodramatic orgy of media-inspired fear, outrage, and cheap thrills, the insanity continues unabated. Insurance profits go up, responsible medical treatment goes down. No problem, right?
CDC had NO Federal charter for establishing “guidelines” on prescribing practice. That mandate is delegated by law to the US FDA, which resoundingly REJECTED PROP’s propaganda petitions for restrictions on opioids, as groundless.
So what did Kolodny and his insurance company pals do? An end run around the FDA by re-labeling opioid overdose as an epidemic and infiltrating the CDC, resulting in the fraudulent 2016 CDC’s published “guidelines” that are resoundingly WRONG.
Factually wrong, scientifically wrong, medically wrong, and ethically abysmal. And they continue to cost lives, day after day, year after year. And it will only get worse.