Analysis: Overprescribers have troubling records
Prescribing high volumes of Schedule 2 drugs can indicate a doctor is running a pill mill, said Andrew Kolodny, chief medical officer of Phoenix House, a New York-based drug treatment provider.
“We wait till these doctors kill people. … It doesn’t make any sense,” said Kolodny, founder of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing, which advocates for tighter regulation of painkillers.
“It’s a real area of concern for us,” said Shantanu Agrawal, a physician who is director of the Center for Program Integrity within the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Medicare’s Part D data draws a roadmap to the doctors who prescribe controlled substances most frequently.
In 2012, 269 providers wrote at least 3,000 prescriptions for Schedule 2 drugs, ProPublica’s analysis shows. They were concentrated in a handful of states. Florida led the country with 52 providers, followed by Tennessee with 25.Ohio had 15 doctors dole out more than 3,000 prescriptions for those drugs — tied for third with North Carolina.
Imagine those Seniors and disabled who are covered by Medicare Part D taking more C-II for pain management…. and the “cut-off” if a prescriber is running a pill mill is having 250 chronic pain pts (12 Rxs/yr X 250) = 3000 prescriptions. Now that the DEA is strongly suggest that all Rxs are for 30 days supply… any prescriber that has been providing 90 days supply.. with this change a large number of prescriber could be pushed over the “trigger” of operating a “pill mill”
And we all know that treating chronic disease states is all about NUMBERS !
Filed under: General Problems
Tennessee is using what was to prevent duplicate prescriptions on the monthly medication sheets to target the top doctors and pharmacies for investigation. Yet they stupidity let only pain specialists write 30 days of narcotics. So of course any one but government would realize that the doctors are only treating pain patients correctly and still being a target. And no pharmacies to fill prescriptions.
Wow,so I am now an addict because after my 4th back surgery, I still live in pain 24/7. I am a chronic pain patient who goes to pain mgmt. Unfortunately after a year of being their patient I am still in the same amount of pain that I started with, this I do not understand. My level 7 is someone not in pain their level 10. Try living and working 45 hours a week in that much pain for over 8 years than call me an addict. The pain medication just takes the edge off the pain. Walk 10 minutes in my shoes.
Hmmm lets see here, the elderly and citizens w/ chronic incurable systemic disease states or irreparable disabling injuries are in more pain than the avg citizen? AND in need of pain medication? How could this be?
Seems rather like common sense to me.
Maybe psychiatrists like Kolodny should get their own house in order before criticizing the experts on treating pain.
Under Kool-Aid’s theory there just isn’t enough evidence to warrant those w/out cancer receiving opioid medication for longer than 90 days.
Well, if evidence were needed for treatment, we might as well outlaw the entire practice of psychiatry because there is NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER to explain the THEORY OF CHEMICAL IMBALANCE leading to diagnosis of depression, bi-polar disorder, anxiety, ADHD, or any of the other maladies that are treated based upon symptoms alone, mostly by the patients themselves.
AT LEAST w/ the disabled and those with serious irreparable injuries there is some documentation or proof to warrant treatment with opioid medication. You know biopsies, laboratory findings like anti-bodies, MRIs, CT scans, functionality testing like EMGs and nerve conduction studies, etc, etc
I mean if the disabled aren’t qualified to receive these pain meds then I dont know who is.
As for the field of Psychiatry? Where to begin, where to begin……
http://www.antidepressantsfacts.com/Biochemical-Imbalance.htm
The information below can be found in this link.
While the rest of medicine has made great advances in diagnostic techniques, psychiatry has lagged behind
“The process of diagnosis is very different in psychiatry. Since there are no clear indications of a specific biological abnormality that causes any of the psychiatric disorders, no laboratory tests have been developed to confirm or refute any psychiatric diagnosis.”
[Richark Keefe and Philip Harvey, Understanding Schizophrenia]
“…….psychiatrists do not rule out other medical problems, rather, they rule in their diagnosis, failing to diagnose the nearly one hundred medical illnesses which contain “depression” as a symptom of that disease process. In a Florida study, 100 consecutively admitted patients to a psychiatric hospital who had been given a psychiatric diagnosis were given a complete medical examination. Doctors concluded that nearly half of the patients’ psychiatric problems were secondary manifestations of an undiagnosed medical problem.
[Mark Gold, The Good News About Depression]
In the Florida study, psychiatrists missed diagnosing physical illness in 80% of the cases. Gold said he was “embarrassed” at how bad psychiatrists were at “doctoring” and that one third of psychiatrists admit feeling incompetent to give a patient a complete physical examination. [Mark Gold, The Good News About Depression]
ADDICTION?
Now, about these opioid addicts. Psychiatrist like Mr Kool-Aid dont exactly have an unbiased opinion for their concerns. The new DSM has expanded the criteria for what makes a patient ‘eligible’ to be labeled an addict, who can then be treated by Kool-Aid and his addiction psych doctors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/12/us/dsm-revisions-may-sharply-increase-addiction-diagnoses.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Speaking of the new DSM-5 and the diagnosis of addiction,,,,,,
Dr. Keith Humphreys, a psychology professor at Stanford….who served as a drug control policy adviser to the White House from 2009 to 2010, predicted that as many as 20 million people who were previously not recognized as having a substance abuse problem would probably be included under the new definition,
“This represents the single biggest expansion in the quality and quantity of addiction treatment this country has seen in 40 years,” Dr. Humphreys said, adding that the new federal health care law may allow an additional 30 million people who abuse drugs or alcohol to gain insurance coverage and access to treatment.”‘
Kolodny has often been outspoken on pain treatment and the influence of Big Pharma on the experts in the field of pain management.,
What about psychiatry?
Some critics of the new manual have said that it has been tainted by researchers’ ties to pharmaceutical companies.
“The ties between the D.S.M. panel members and the pharmaceutical industry are so extensive that there is the real risk of corrupting the public health mission of the manual,” said Dr. Lisa Cosgrove, a fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, who published a study in March that said two-thirds of the manual’s advisory task force members reported ties to the pharmaceutical industry or other financial conflicts of interest
And what about the authoritative DSM? How is the manual created? What evidence are the experts basing their definitions?
From Christopher Lane’s book “Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness”.
http://www.biopsychiatry.com/bigpharma/drugcompanies-doctors.html
“Given its importance, you might think that the DSM represents the authoritative distillation of a large body of scientific evidence. But Lane, using unpublished records from the archives of the American Psychiatric Association and interviews with the principals, shows that it is instead the product of a complex of academic politics, personal ambition, ideology, and, perhaps most important, the influence of the pharmaceutical industry. What the DSM lacks is evidence. Lane quotes one contributor to the DSM-III task force:
There was very little systematic research, and much of the research that existed was really a hodgepodge—scattered, inconsistent, and ambiguous. I think the majority of us recognized that the amount of good, solid science upon which we were making our decisions was pretty modest.
Lane uses shyness as his case study of disease-mongering in psychiatry. Shyness as a psychiatric illness made its debut as “social phobia” in DSM-III in 1980, but was said to be rare. By 1994, when DSM-IV was published, it had become “social anxiety disorder,” now said to be extremely common. According to Lane, GlaxoSmithKline, hoping to boost sales for its antidepressant, Paxil, decided to promote social anxiety disorder as “a severe medical condition.” In 1999, the company received FDA approval to market the drug for social anxiety disorder. It launched an extensive media campaign to do it, including posters in bus shelters across the country showing forlorn individuals and the words “Imagine being allergic to people…,” and sales soared. Barry Brand, Paxil’s product director, was quoted as saying, “Every marketer’s dream is to find an unidentified or unknown market and develop it. That’s what we were able to do with social anxiety disorder.”
SOUND FAMILIAR? Social Anxiety Disorder a debilitating illness needing help from psychiatrists, NARCOTIC EPIDEMIC, a crisis needing the help of psychiatrists? Very interesting……………and quite sickening as well. Similar tactics and another ploy to recruit, willingly or not, more patients for psychiatry
.
It appears that painting the disabled with chronic pain as addicts can be a rather lucrative undertaking for those with a clear financial incentive to help the poor narcotic addicts from themselves and their drug pushing doctors, I meant those who have a real concern for patients and their overall quality of life, Just another profiteering quack IMO.
YO KOLODNY STICK TO PSYCHIATRY where you can make up the rules as you go along and stay the hell out of pain management of which it is painfully obvious you are unqualified to speak about with any knowledge or gave a direct conflict of interest,
DONT DRINK THE KOOL-AID!!!!!
Liked your post, Coonhound. The original article is found on the ProPublica website, where I posted a rather long comment myself.