Pain Category Archives — DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog Published by Washington, D.C. Personal Injury Lawyers

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 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 10, 2018

It’s not just celebrities; CDC warns of public health crisis in suicides

by Patrick A. Malone

Uncle Sam’s sobering new report about suicide rates rising in all but one state between 1999 and 2016, with fatal increases across age, gender, race and ethnicity, became even more somber and urgent with the shock and grief expressed widely over the self-inflicted deaths of chef-raconteur Anthony Bourdain in France and fashion designer-entrepreneur Kate Spade in Manhattan.

Suicide no longer should be viewed solely as a personal mental health problem but also now as a public health crisis, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned. Anne Schuchat, the CDC’s principal deputy director, told the Washington Post: “The data are disturbing. The widespread nature of the [suicide rate] increase, in every state but one, really suggests that this is a national problem hitting most communities.”

The suicides of Bourdain, 61, and Spade, 55, hit many hard, as was reflected in the extensive media coverage and social media reactions. Both Bourdain and Spade rose from modest circumstances, with abundant hard work, talent, personality, and ambition, to lead lives in the spotlight, and with an economic comfort that others would envy and consider glamorous. They were “successes.”

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 25, 2018

Experts issue new cautions as hospitals and ERs treat a spike in teen suicides

by Patrick A. Malone

Moms, dads, grandparents, teachers, and coaches all may need to increase even more the attention and concern they devote to teen-agers, especially young women, as hospitals and emergency rooms report dramatic increases in their treatment of youthful suicides.

Multiple news organizations reported that, as the New York Times noted, “the proportion of emergency room and hospital encounters for … suicide-related diagnoses almost tripled, from 0.66 percent in 2008 to 1.82 percent in 2015. And the rate of increase was highest among adolescent girls.”

NPR reported: “Children ages 5 to 17 visited children’s hospitals for suicidal thoughts or attempts about twice as often in 2015 as in 2008.”

May 8, 2018

Cities battle opioid carnage that now includes lethal fentanyl mixtures

by Patrick A. Malone

Ss the nation’s opioid crisis spirals into ever-more risky territory where synthetic painkillers get mixed with illegal drugs with fatal results, reporters are digging deeper into how drug companies got the country into this mess and cities now are stepping up with different approaches to curb deadly overdoses.

Vox, an online news and information site, reported that experts aren’t sure why, but they’re seeing an ugly trend in users and dealers mixing fentanyl, a synthetic opioid and sometimes legally prescribed painkiller, and other illicit narcotics, notably cocaine and heroin.

Vox reporter German Lopez, in interviews with drug experts, finds they are divided: Some think the deadly mixtures are occurring on purpose, with users seeking even greater intoxication or dealers promoting this to them. It may be that the mixtures are occurring unintentionally, as fentanyl, even in the tiniest amount as a residue, packs a wallop. Or it may be that authorities, as they try to get a better handle on the opioid crisis, have developed sharper data on drug abuses.

May 6, 2018

Medical hype can be lethal, as ‘minimally invasive’ chest surgery shows

by Patrick A. Malone

Doctors and hospitals have a right to blow their own horn a bit when they’re onto something good, don’t they? What’s the harm? Plenty, as reported by Healthnewsreview.org, an independent, nonpartisan health information watchdog site.

As part of a series on patient harm from misleading media, Joy Victory, the site’s managing editor, details the tragic results from superficial news stories, typically on smaller media outlets, that deceive patients and their families about the Nuss procedure, a surgery to correct a congenital condition that results in a concave or “funnel” chest (see photo).

This is a serious operation, as I know from my practice. But as Victory points out, this hard, cold fact somehow gets glossed over in glowing reports about the surgery, written by news services and by reporters at smaller papers in South Carolina, Virginia, and Myrtle Beach, Fla., and even in a larger daily in Kansas City, Mo.

April 8, 2018

As opioids take a work toll, more Americans urged to carry overdose antidote

by Patrick A. Malone

Our nation’s lethal opioid epidemic is reaching its tentacles right into our paychecks, as employers face rising health insurance costs that crimp their ability to give pay raises to the rest of us. This is happening even as we are being urged to carry overdose antidotes, just in case.

The independent, nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation reported that its new analysis of large employer insurance claims shows that American businesses paid $2.6 billion in 2016 to treat opioid addiction and overdoses by their covered workers and dependents. That compares to $273 million in 2004, so it’s up ten-fold in a decade.

The costs of caring for opioid abuse skyrocketed, even as employer health insurance saw sharp declines in the number and expense for prescriptions and use of powerful painkillers.

March 26, 2018

U.S. put up $1 billion already to fight opioid crisis. But states failed to spend it.

by Patrick A. Malone

President Trump’s latest rant that drug dealers should face capital punishment fell flat in the face of new revelations on what’s going on with the fight against opioid drug overdoses and abuse that have become the leading killer of Americans younger than 50.

It turns out that states have failed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in funding appropriated by Congress to battle the abuse of prescription painkillers, potent synthetic versions like fentanyl, and illicit drugs like heroin.

Politico reported that the Obama Administration, in the 21^st Century Cures Act, passed by the Congress and signed into law by the president as 2016 ended, provided more than $1 billion over two years in grants to help states attack the opioid crisis.