More treatment. Stronger oversight. And above all, bolder leadership.

Oxycodone is a narcotic pain reliever, an ingredient of painkillers that have contributed to the current opioid crisis. Photograph: Education Images/UIG via Getty Images

~ Foreword ~
This following article lacks understanding of cause and effect. The government caused the opioid crisis. They made pain the 4th vital sign. Every clinic and hospital was evaluated, surveyed, and rated on whether a pain score was done on each patient and if the pain was helped by the doctor. Ratings and financial rewards were tied to the outcome. ( sounds like the VA scandal doesn’t it? ) Every doctor with a working brain thought this was foolish and would lead to addiction. The Electronic Medical Record has continued this as a performance standard. Babies have their pain score recorded in ER notes. Here is my solution: 1. Dump the pain score. 2. Dump the EMR that depersonalizes medicine. 3. Teach your children that pain during life if normal. 4. Stop pretending that we can prescribe narcotics and they will not be addicting. ~ Rosemary Stein, MD
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Gwyneth, watch out.

On Monday, the Food and Drug Administration announced plans to crack down on so-called “homeopathic remedies”—treatments that due to agency enforcement policy have managed to avoid regulatory oversight.

But no more, says the agency. Many of those products, it said in a statement, aren’t just herbal tea cures for a sore throat. They’re products being marketed as treatments for serious diseases—hope bottled up and sold to desperate people, without any sort of clinical evidence that they might actually work. Continue reading →

Research shows prescription drugs are the 3rd leading cause of death

According to Peter C. Gøtzsche, a Danish physician and medical researcher, prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer.

Based on the findings that Gøtzsche studied, it is possible that “psychiatric drugs alone are also the third major killer,” and this is primarily due to antidepressants causing the deaths of many elderly people through falls. It is apparent that the system we have for “researching, approving, marketing and using drugs” is “totally broken.” Continue reading →

The Sackler dynasty’s ruthless marketing of painkillers has generated billions of dollars—and millions of addicts.

An addiction specialist said that the Sacklers’ firm, Purdue Pharma, bears the “lion’s share” of the blame for the opioid crisis. Illustration by Ben Wiseman

The north wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a vast, airy enclosure featuring a banked wall of glass and the Temple of Dendur, a sandstone monument that was constructed beside the Nile two millennia ago and transported to the Met, brick by brick, as a gift from the Egyptian government. The space, which opened in 1978 and is known as the Sackler Wing, is also itself a monument, to one of America’s great philanthropic dynasties. The Brooklyn-born brothers Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond Sackler, all physicians, donated lavishly during their lifetimes to an astounding range of institutions, many of which today bear the family name: the Sackler Gallery, in Washington; the Sackler Museum, at Harvard; the Sackler Center for Arts Education, at the Guggenheim; the Sackler Wing at the Louvre; and Sackler institutes and facilities at Columbia, Oxford, and a dozen other universities. The Sacklers have endowed professorships and underwritten medical research. The art scholar Thomas Lawton once likened the eldest brother, Arthur, to “a modern Medici.” Before Arthur’s death, in 1987, he advised his children, “Leave the world a better place than when you entered it.” Continue reading →