Stealth Public Relations and Health Advocacy, Special Pleadings and the Opposition to Guidelines Discouraging Overuse of Narcotics

As I have written before as a physician who saw too many dire results of intravenous drug abuse, I was amazed how narcotics were pushed as the treatment of choice for chronic pain in the 1990s, with the result that the US was once again engulfed in an epidemic of narcotic abuse and its effects.  In mid-December, 2015, as reported in the Washington Post,The nation continues to suffer through a widespread epidemic to prescription opioids and their illegal cousin, heroin. The CDC estimated that 20 percent of patients who complain about acute or chronic pain that is not from cancer are prescribed opioids. Health-care providers wrote 259 million prescriptions for the medications in 2012, 'enough for every adult in the United States to have a bottle of pills,' the CDC wrote.Last week, the National Center for Health Statistics reported that the number of overdose deaths from legal opioid drugs surged by 16.3 percent in 2014, to 18,893, while overdose fatalities from heroin climbed by 28 percent, to 10,574. Authorities have said that previous efforts to restrict prescription drug abuse have forced some people with addictions to the medications onto heroin, which is cheaper and widely available.This rising tide of death and morbidity seems to have been fueled by reckless, sometimes deceptive, sometimes illegal marketing by the pharmaceutical companies that produced narcotics other than heroin.Background - Legal Drug PushingAs I wrote in 2013,the realization began to dawn that pat...
Source: Health Care Renewal - Category: Health Management Tags: CDC Cephalon conflicts of interest deception Endo Health Solutions Johnson and Johnson narcotics public relations Purdue Pharma stealth health policy advocacy Source Type: blogs