Addiction

August 6, 2018

As Big Pharma rivals battled to hype opioids, watchdogs dozed. They slumber still.

When Big Pharma pursues rapacious profits and regulators snooze, patients suffer terrible consequences, as new revelations about the opioid crisis show.

Kaiser Health News Service , via the Washington Post, and The New York Times both have done excellent investigative digging into drug makers’ role in fueling the prescription painkiller mess that authorities estimate claims 116 lives a day due to overdoses.

Fred Schulte, writing for the independent, nonpartisan Kaiser service, reported that rival makers — seeing how much money Purdue Pharma was making with its powerful and addictive OxyContin drug and that it was encountering law enforcement and regulatory challenges — stepped in with “similarly dangerous painkillers, such as fentanyl, morphine and methadone.”

July 24, 2018

More bad booze news: Liver disease deaths are rising, especially among young

by Patrick A. Malone

Summer tipplers may want to steer away from that second glass of sangria, or rethink that next round of beers. That’s because there’s yet more bad news about Americans and booze abuse: Liver disease deaths are spiking, with fatalities tied to cirrhosis jumping by 65 percent between 1999 and 2016, while those connected with liver cancer doubled in the same time span.

Americans 25- to 34-years-old saw the steepest increases in alcohol-related liver disease, with the number of annual deaths in seven years, as studied by Michigan experts, nearly tripling.

“Alcohol misuse and its complications” is striking down a new generation of Americans, Elliot Tapper, a University of Michigan liver expert and lead author of a newly published study on liver cancer, told the Washington Post.

July 20, 2018

When Big Pharma dives for dollars, crises erupt but dire needs go unanswered

by Patrick A. Malone

Americans should be wary lest they get in between Big Pharma and a buck.

That’s what investigators for a U.S. Senate subcommittee showed when scrutinizing how industry middlemen inundated the Show Me State with more than a billion doses of powerful prescription painkillers, making big profits but asking few questions how so many opioid drugs could be taken by so few patients.

It’s also what patients might see as drug makers retreat from research to develop needed new antibiotics and therapies for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

June 29, 2018

WHO makes it official: Young folks can get addicted to video gaming

by Patrick A. Malone

Electronic devices can pose risks to the health and well-being of global users: Specifically, some preoccupied players now officially may be deemed video game addicts, says WHO.

WHO, of course, is the well-respected World Health Organization, which just made “gaming disorder” a part of its International Classification of Diseases, a key compendium of medical conditions. The ICD, the Los Angeles Times reported, is important because

[It] gives medical professionals around the world a single standard for identifying a problematic medical or behavioral issue and accepting it as a disorder worthy of attention and treatment. Despite differing languages and social, cultural and medical traditions, the WHO’s 191 member nations recognize these common definitions of diseases. In addition, the classification codes are the foundation for health insurance billing in the United States. The absence of a diagnostic code makes it difficult for a healthcare professional to treat a patient and then get paid for that treatment.

June 22, 2018

Depression and suicide risk are side-effects in too many common drugs

by Patrick A. Malone

Patients, doctors, and pharmacists may want to be more wary about more than 200 commonly prescribed drugs that not only treat an array of medical conditions but also carry depression and suicide risk as side effects. More than a third of Americans take the medications, and they report higher depression rates than those who don’t, with their risks increasing as they add in more of these drugs, a new study finds.

The medications, researchers said, are seemingly ubiquitous, and polypharmacy ── patients taking multiple drugs for different conditions at the same time ── with the depression- and suicide-risk meds is frequent in an alarming fashion. As NPR, the New York Times, and the news site Vox reported, the drugs include:

Certain types of proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) used to treat acid reflux. These are sold, by prescription and over the counter, under brand names like Prilosec and Zantac.

June 15, 2018

San Francisco voters send strong message cracking down on kids’ vaping

by Patrick A. Malone

San Francisco voters, upholding their elected leaders’ enlightened lawmaking, bashed Big Tobacco and its interests, providing a potent primary election message to public health officials nationwide to curb the growing menace to young people posed by e-cigarettes and vaping.

By a 2-to-1 margin, Bay Area residents supported their Board of Supervisors’ tough ban — which may be the most stringent in the nation — on sales of flavored tobacco products, including vaping liquids packaged as candies and juice boxes, and menthol cigarettes.

Specialized liquids, peddled in flavors like bubble gum, chicken and waffles, and unicorn milk, are key to the youth craze for vaping, in which teens use small devices about the size of a computer flash drive to get a nicotine-fueled boost. They can, with standard hits from liquids in devices like the trendy Juul, regularly consume as much nicotine as is found in a pack of cigarettes.

June 7, 2018

Stigma inflicts harsh toll on mentally ill, but society pays too

by Patrick A. Malone

Although Americans keep making progress toward ending the stigma associated with mental disorders, including trying to put public funding for the diseases’ treatment on a more even footing, patients with serious mental illness suffer unfairly and harshly still due to their conditions.

Dhruv Khullar, a doctor at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and a researcher at the Weill Cornell Department of Healthcare Policy and Research, has written a painful piece for the “Upshot,” an evidence-based column for the New York Times. His article, “The Largest Health Disparity We Don’t Talk About,” reports that:

Americans with depression, bipolar disorder or other serious mental illnesses die 15 to 30 years younge r than those without mental illness — a disparity larger than for race, ethnicity, geography or socioeconomic status. It’s a gap, unlike many others, that has been growing, but it receives considerably less academic study or public attention. The extraordinary life expectancy gains of the past half-century [for most in this country] have left these patients behind, with the result that Americans with serious mental illness live shorter lives than those in many of the world’s poorest countries.

June 5, 2018

With more legal pot and a raging opioid crisis, deadly drugged driving spikes

by Patrick A. Malone

There’s been a deadly side to the nation’s opioid drug abuse crisis and increasing number of states’ legalization of marijuana: A leading safety group says the number of drugged drivers killed in car crashes is rising dramatically.

The Governors Highway Safety Association reported that 44 percent of fatally injured drivers tested for drugs had positive results in 2016, which is up more than 50 percent compared with a decade ago, according to a blog post by the nonprofit, nonpartisan Pew Trusts, which added that, “more than half the drivers tested positive for marijuana, opioids or a combination of the two.”

As Pew reported, the District of Columbia and nine states “allow marijuana to be sold for recreational and medical use, and 21 others allow it to be sold for medical use. Opioid addiction and overdoses have become a national crisis, with an estimated 115 deaths a day. States are struggling to get a handle on drugged driving. Traffic safety experts say that while it’s easy for police to test drivers for alcohol impairment using a breathalyzer, it’s much harder to detect and screen them for drug impairment. There is no nationally accepted method for testing drivers, and the number of drugs to test for is large. Different drugs also have different effects on drivers. And there is no definitive data linking drugged driving to crashes.”

May 20, 2018

Dangerous doctors rip off Medicare, creep out coeds, harm transplant patients

by Patrick A. Malone

Callous institutional inertia can allow dangerous doctors to keep harming patients. But media digging deserves credit for raising needed alarms when professional caregivers and others fail to step up to protect individuals as disparate as taxpayers, seniors, coeds, and heart transplant recipients.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and MedPage Today performed a public service, reporting that they found more than 200 doctors nationwide who surrendered a license, had one revoked, or were excluded from state-paid health care rolls in the previous five years but somehow remained on the federal Medicare rolls in 2015.

This meant the problem doctors could keep bad practices afloat, in part because Uncle Sam ─ that’s taxpayers like you and me ─ paid these hundreds of MDs $25.8 million to care for seniors, among the nation’s most vulnerable patients.

May 17, 2018

Concern swirls anew over health risks posed by nasty ‘third-hand’ smoke

by Patrick A. Malone

It may not come as much more than a duh factor to nonsmokers with roomies with a heavy cigarette habit, but medical scientists are expressing growing concern about risks posed by “third hand” smoke, residual films left on all manner of environments and surfaces by burning tobacco, close and far.

Multiple media outlets reported on the growing evidence on this potential harm, notably as detailed in a study published in the journal Science Advances. The research, conducted almost by chance, “shows how tobacco smoke from outdoor air can seep into a nonsmoking classroom and coat its surfaces, and how those hazardous chemicals often become airborne again and circulate throughout buildings via central air-conditioning systems,” the Washington Post said.

The newspaper reported that indoor and outdoor air experts at Drexel University in Philadelphia had teamed up and happened to sample surfaces from an empty classroom near their testing lab. They were intrigued to find chemical traces they could not explain, and which they first thought might be tied to coffee spills. But sleuthing led them to determine the residues were from nicotine and tobacco smoke, which only could have been carried into the space by air conditioning or supposed fresh air breezes.