CDC refuses responsibility in Chronic Pain Care because of the Opioid crisis
Footage from the RX summit in Atlanta, Georgia.
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CDC refuses responsibility in Chronic Pain Care because of the Opioid crisis
Posted on June 2, 2021 by Pharmaciststeve
song writer: Rob Thomas wrote this song for his wife who suffers from chronic pain
Posted on June 2, 2021 by Pharmaciststeve
Has anyone heard the song that Rob Thomas wrote for his wife who suffers from chronic pain? It’s called “Her Diamonds” which means her tears. It made my husband cry. It might be good for caregivers
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Marines of Lima Company remember the fallen and reunite in Nashville to halt veteran suicides
Posted on May 31, 2021 by Pharmaciststeve
Marines of Lima Company remember the fallen and reunite in Nashville to halt veteran suicides
60 surviving members gathered for a reunion weekend dubbed Operation Resiliency
https://www.foxnews.com/us/marines-lima-company-remember-reunite-nashville-halt-veteran-suicides
The Marines of Lima Company, 3rd battalion, 25th Marines, took some of the heaviest casualties during the Iraq War. Of the 184 Marines who deployed together from this Ohio Reserve unit, 23 were killed in action, including 15 in one roadside bomb in Anbar province, the largest single loss of life in a roadside bombing during the war.
Those who survived the seven-month tour, including 37 who received Purple Hearts, had some of their hardest days after returning home. Their 2005 deployment on the Syrian border was to some of the war’s biggest ambush territory. They received three Silver and 11 Bronze Stars for valor. Back home, suicide became the enemy of this battle hardened unit who spent all but 10 days of their tour “outside the wire,” the safety of their base camp.
Private First Class Michael Logue on a tank
Private First Class Michael Logue was 19 years old in 2005. This native of Lebanon, Ohio, deployed six months after high school, postponed college and became the unit’s “mortar guy.”
“You know, I personally took sniper fire, machine gun fire, RPG fire bounces just feet away from your head and it’s a dud and bounces around the rooftop with you, you know, thank the Lord. Direct impact, mortars just feet above your head,” Logue recalled.
MARINE FATHER’S SALUTE TO SON GOES VIRAL: REPORT
On May 11, six Marines were killed in a deadly roadside bombing just days after two others were killed as Lima Company took a break from clearing houses. “You know, the very last house that one of our teams was clearing ended up being just a ‘kill house,’ it was concrete steel reinforced with a 50 cal machine gun under the concrete to basically be aimed up at the entryway so that when the Marines that were in there popped off their helmets,” Logue said.
It was a shooting gallery. The losses from that incident and so many others still haunt the unit, which is why their commanders reached out to The Independence Fund, which had partnered with the Department of Veterans Affairs to participate in a pilot program to prevent additional suicides among veterans. The idea was born at the funeral for Derek Hills (Bravo Company, 2-508) from the 82nd Airborne in 2018. “Someone said, ’see you at the next funeral’,” recalled Danica Thomas of The Independence Fund, whose husband, Allen, a combat vet from the same unit had died by suicide. “We said, no, there’s not going to be another one.”
Lima Company preparing to head outside the wire in Iraq.
Sixty surviving members of Lima Company gathered in Nashville for a reunion weekend dubbed Operation Resiliency and organized by The Independence Fund from May 20-23. For some, it was the first time they had seen each other in 16 years. Last year, 571 service members died by suicide, up 13% from the year before. The VA estimates 17 veterans take their lives every day, an epidemic made worse during the isolation of the past year’s pandemic.
“You’re always vigilant. You’re always in that hyperactive. So, you know, as a 19-year-old combat veteran returned home to Lebanon, Ohio, you know, two weeks being home, in my mind, I just felt like I wasn’t home. I felt like I was home. I felt like there was unfinished business. We left brothers, you know, and blood on the sand in Iraq,” explained Logue, who attended the Operation Resiliency weekend. He is now married and has two children, living in Cincinnati. “Statistically speaking, the highest rate of suicide in the military is combat veteran males from 18 to 25.”
As the Marines from Lima Company checked into the Nashville hotel, some were given T-shirts that said “Not all Heroes Wear Capes.” They hugged. Some cried. The weekend began with storytelling.
Their Sgt Major Dan Altieri, told them, “It’s OK not to be OK.” Therapists from the VA broke the ice with talk therapy broken up by group physical therapy and a little axe throwing, for good measure.
“Sometimes they just lose their memories or they want to forget about things that they did and they thought it was maybe a negative part of their life. So you get back together with groups like this, rekindle, listen to other people’s stories and just know that the military made them who they are today or being a large part of who they are today. And I think that’s a positive experience for everyone,” Lima Company’s Brian Hamilton said.
NASCAR TO HONOR FALLEN MARINE FROM OREGON AT COCA-COLA 600 IN NORTH CAROLINA
They talked about some of the worst days of their deployment: like May 11, when Michael Logue was traveling in a convoy of Amphibious Assault Vehicles, which at that time were not armored and were being used by the Marines on land. “There’s nothing assault about it. It’s a big, large, soft target. It has an aluminum underbelly,” Logue explained. The Marines bolted armor to the sides for makeshift protection but that made the vehicles move slowly. “We’ve got 17 Marines packed into it, knees interlocked. Shoulder to shoulder. We’re sitting on about 50,000 rounds of ammunition.” His platoon sergeant ordered him to switch assault vehicles at the last moment, a decision that saved his life.
“I stand up on overwatch and we start rolling forward. And 30 seconds later, I see a Marine in the open. I see a fireball. And then I see I, you know, start to feel explode, you know, start to hear the explosion because you always kind of feel it and see things first and then then you actually hear it,” Logue told Fox News. “It was a pressure plate, IED with like hacksaw blades, and it shot the amount of explosives, had a piece of steel over top of it. So it creates a big shaped charge. And it just sliced right through the aluminum underbelly of this Amphibious Assault Vehicle hitting all the jet fuel, hitting all the 50,000 rounds of ammunition.”
Fifteen Marines were killed instantly.
On May 11, 15 Marines were killed instantly by an IED.
One of his fellow Marines, Mike Strahle, was flung by the blast into an open field. He survived and has spent recent years traveling the country with a display of the boots and dog tags of Lima Company and telling their story in “Eyes of Freedom.”
They mounted the display in Nashville along with the photo and dog tag of Lance Corporal Nicholas B. Erdy – who was on the vehicle that blew up on May 11, 2005, shortly after Michael Logue was told to change vehicles.
“It’s the first time in 16 years I kind of mentioned this inside,” said Lima Company’s Jeff Valentine. “it almost felt like we were deployed again. It was fun. We’re all away from our normal homes. It’s just the guys. We’ve got to tell our stories freely and laugh and joke. And it was great. … The biggest thing for me was every stressor I have in my everyday life was gone for the last 72 hours. And I just it was like a reset. It felt great. I don’t know. I felt like I was 22 years old. It was fun.”
They did a service project: painting shelters for homeless vets.
“Something like this, you know, this program helps me kind of understand, ‘Hey, I’m not the only one, you know, I’m not the only one,'” Leighton Redhouse explained. “It’s kind of opening my eyes like, oh f–k, yeah, I’m not the one. Because when it’s you, you kind of think I’m the only one going through this.”
They visited the Johnny Cash Museum, where Cash’s nephew played guitar and a bugler played the national anthem and taps for those who did not come home.
Lima Company 3/25 killed in action:
• Private First Class Christopher R. Dixon 5/11/2005
• Lance Corporal Christopher P. Lyons 7/28/2005
• Staff Sergeant Anthony L. Goodwin 5/8/2005
• Petty Officer 3rd Class Travis Youngblood (Navy Corpsman) 7/21/2005
• Sergeant Justin F. Hoffman 8/03/2005
• Staff Sergeant Kendall H. Ivy II 5/11/2005
• Lance Corporal Nicholas William B. Bloem 8/3/2005
• Corporal Andre L. Williams 7/28/2005
• Lance Corporal Grant B. Fraser 8/3/2005
• Lance Corporal Aaron H. Reed 8/3/2005
• Lance Corporal Edward A. Schroeder II 8/3/2005
• Sergeant David Kenneth J. Kreuter 8/3/2005
• Lance Corporal Jourdan L. Grez 5/11/2005
• Lance Corporal William B. Wightman 8/3/2005
• Lance Corporal Timothy M. Bell, Jr. 8/3/2005
• Lance Corporal Eric J. Bernholtz 8/3/2005
• Corporal Dustin A. Derga 5/8/2005
• Lance Corporal Nicholas B. Erdy 5/11/2005
• Lance Corporal Wesley G. Davids 5/11/2005
• Sergeant David N. Wimberg 5/25/2005
• Lance Corporal Michael J. Cifuentes 8/3/2005
• Lance Corporal Christopher J. Dyer 8/3/2005
• Lance Corporal Jonathan W. Grant 5/11/2005
If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255). Veterans can also reach out to the Veterans Suicide Hotline at 1-800-273-8255.
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An Invitation to Save Our pharmacy Profession and Improve Working Conditions
Posted on May 30, 2021 by Pharmaciststeve
| An Invitation to Save Our Profession and Improve Working Conditions |
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Never submit passwords through Google Forms.
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No empathy.. no compassion…. just denial of proper therapy
Posted on May 28, 2021 by Pharmaciststeve
Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.): EMERGENCY SURGERY (perforated ulcer) taking- a lot of Motrin for pain – to avoid taking opiates post dental surgery
Posted on May 27, 2021 by Pharmaciststeve
Over The Counter doesn’t mean Always Safe
https://ncpa.org/newsroom/qam/2021/05/26/qam-gi-over-counter-doesnt-mean-always-safe
Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) didn’t want to take opioids after painful dental surgery. So she took Motrin. A lot of it. All that Motrin led to emergency surgery last week for a perforated ulcer. According to a story from The Washington Post, “there’s a real education gap” among members of the public about the potentially serious side effects of these medications. “Just because something’s available over the counter doesn’t mean it’s safe to be used by everyone for any amount of time,” the director of the Gastrointestinal Motility Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital said. Experts explain why Dingell’s experience should serve as a cautionary tale.
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Why drug-discount programs aren’t always a good deal
Posted on May 26, 2021 by Pharmaciststeve
Why drug-discount programs aren’t always a good deal
Buying prescription drugs through GoodRx, Amazon and other alternative avenues does not guarantee patients are getting a good deal.
The big picture: More people are purchasing their drugs with cash instead of using their health insurance, in large part because they are getting sizable discounts. But discounted prices often still have no relation to a drug’s actual cost.
How it works: The amount people pay out of pocket for their medication is tied to secretive contracts among pharmacy benefit managers, health insurers, distributors, pharmaceutical companies, pharmacies and other entities.
- When people decide to use discount programs like GoodRx (now a publicly traded company) or go to cash-only pharmacies, they are no longer using their insurance — and thus any amount they pay doesn’t go toward deductibles and out-of-pocket limits.
- People do this because those discounted prices still could be lower than if they were using insurance.
Yes, but: Generic versions of the HIV pill Truvada have significantly brought down the drug’s price, but not for everyone, according to new research from analysts at drug-pricing firm 46brooklyn.
Here’s what a monthly supply of generic Truvada costs someone through a cash-paying program, according to 46brooklyn:
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$1,567 at Amazon, which uses a discount card program owned by Cigna and its PBM Express Scripts.
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$112 at GoodRx, which generates most of its revenue from PBMs.
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$25 at Blueberry, a small, cash-only pharmacy in Pittsburgh that eschews the entire supply chain.
Between the lines: All of these prices are cheaper than the $1,800 per-month cash price of brand-name Truvada, but most drug-discount programs are tethered to the broken drug-pricing system.
- At $25, Blueberry is still making a profit. So at more than four times Blueberry’s rate, the GoodRx price “isn’t even close to the real cost of the drug,” 46brooklyn’s analysts write.
The bottom line: The existence of so many drug-discount programs is an indictment of both America’s insurance and pharmaceutical systems.
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your next new doctor could be NAMED WATSON !
Posted on May 26, 2021 by Pharmaciststeve
Google Strikes Deal With Hospital Chain to Develop Healthcare Algorithms
ant expands health-sector presence in latest deal to develop tools to improve medical care, as privacy concerns arise
Hospitals are uniquely positioned as brokers for data created by patients seeking care and interacting with doctors, laboratories, pharmacies and medical devices.
Photo: George Etheredge/Bloomberg News
Alphabet Inc.’s GOOG 1.02% Google and national hospital chain HCA Healthcare Inc. HCA 0.77% have struck a deal to develop healthcare algorithms using patient records, the latest foray by a tech giant into the $3 trillion healthcare sector.
HCA, which operates across about 2,000 locations in 21 states, would consolidate and store with Google data from digital health records and internet-connected medical devices under the multiyear agreement. Google and HCA engineers will work to develop algorithms to help improve operating efficiency, monitor patients and guide doctors’ decisions, according to the companies.
“Data are spun off of every patient in real time,” said Dr. Jonathan Perlin, chief medical officer of HCA, which is based in Nashville, Tenn. “Part of what we’re building is a central nervous system to help interpret the various signals.”
The deal expands Google’s reach in healthcare, where the recent shift to digital records has created an explosion of data and a new market for technology giants and startups. Data crunching offers the opportunity to develop new treatments and improve patient safety, but algorithm-development deals between hospitals and tech companies have also raised privacy alarms.
Google has previously reached deals with other prominent U.S. hospital systems, including St. Louis-based Ascension, that granted access to personal patient information, drawing public scrutiny.
Google and Ascension sought to develop a search tool for patient information. The work, dubbed “Project Nightingale” and described in articles by The Wall Street Journal, prompted an outcry over privacy of patient records shared with Google, which included names, dates of birth and medication information. The companies said the effort complied with federal privacy laws.
Google also reached an ambitious deal with Mayo Clinic that combined storage of voluminous medical, genetic and financial data with algorithm-development efforts. The Google deal with Mayo allows Google access to identifying patient information, when needed.
Other tech giants have struck similar deals with hospitals that grant access to identifying information in technology development, such as an effort by Microsoft Corp. and hospital system Providence to use patient records to develop cancer algorithms.
HCA said Google isn’t permitted to use patient-identifiable information under the agreement. Dr. Perlin said HCA patient records would be stripped of identifying information before being shared with Google data scientists and that the hospital system would control access to the data. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed by the companies.
Google will access data when needed with consent from HCA, but the tech giant can develop analytic tools without patient records and allow HCA to test the models independently, said Chris Sakalosky, managing director of healthcare and life sciences at Google Cloud. “We want to push the boundaries of what the clinician can do in real time with data,” he said.
Personal patient information is protected under the federal health-privacy law, known as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. The law allows hospitals and some other healthcare companies, such as health insurers, to share information with contractors, which must also abide by the law’s privacy protections.
Some consider the federal law outdated, saying the law’s protections haven’t kept pace with the technology sector’s growing demand for patient data, said Michelle Mello, a Stanford University professor of law and medicine who focuses on health-data privacy.
Companies may also use the data under the law in ways to develop products that boost corporate profit, with no visibility or control for patients over how their data is used. “Some people just don’t want their data used in particular ways by particular parties,” said Dr. Mello, who has served as an adviser to Alphabet’s Verily Life Sciences.
Health and technology giants have pushed into healthcare data aggregation and algorithm development with mixed results. International Business Machines Corp. has explored a sale of its IBM Watson Health business, as the company’s healthcare artificial-intelligence unit struggled, The Wall Street Journal reported in February.
Hospitals are uniquely positioned as brokers for data created by patients seeking care and interacting with doctors, laboratories, pharmacies and medical devices. They have increasingly sought to capitalize on that data in deals to aggregate patient records or develop products with pharmaceutical and technology companies. “They aren’t sleeping on this opportunity either,” said Jeffrey Becker, principal analyst for healthcare at CB Insights.
Fourteen hospital systems in February announced a newly formed company, Truveta Inc., to sell access to their anonymized records for patients across 40 states. Other hospitals have invested in health-record analytic companies, such as Health Catalyst Inc., which went public in 2019.
The multiyear HCA-Google agreement will seek to develop algorithms using data from 32 million annual patient visits that could help monitor patients and guide treatment, said Dr. Perlin. During the pandemic, HCA used its own technology to monitor critically ill Covid-19 patients and notify doctors of potentially better treatment options. The company found that survival rates increased by comparing the outcomes for patients before and after rolling out the algorithm.
The companies will also seek to develop algorithms that would help improve operations, Dr. Perlin said, such as by automating how hospital units track inventory of critical supplies.
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FDA Restricts Obeticholic Acid (Ocaliva) Over Serious Liver Injury Risk
Posted on May 26, 2021 by Pharmaciststeve
FDA Restricts Obeticholic Acid (Ocaliva) Over Serious Liver Injury Risk
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/951931
The risk for serious liver injury with obeticholic acid (Ocaliva, Intercept Pharmaceuticals) has prompted the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to restrict its use in patients with primary biliary cholangitis (PBC) and advanced cirrhosis.
The agency has added a new contraindication to the obeticholic acid prescribing information and patient medication guide stating that the drug should not be used in patients with PBC and advanced cirrhosis.
The boxed warning on the label has also been revised to include this information.
For patients with PBC who do not have advanced cirrhosis, the FDA believes the benefits of Ocaliva outweigh the risks, based on the original clinical trials.
Five years ago, the FDA granted accelerated approval to obeticholic acid in combination with ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA) in adults who fail to respond adequately to UDCA, or as a monotherapy in adults who cannot tolerate UDCA, as reported by Medscape Medical News.
Since then, the FDA has identified 25 cases of serious liver injury leading to liver decompensation or liver failure in patients with PBC and cirrhosis who were taking obeticholic acid at recommended doses.
According to the FDA, 18 of the cases happened in patients with PBC and compensated cirrhosis who experienced liver injury that led to decompensation. Ten of these patients had evidence or suspicion of portal hypertension at baseline; in the other eight patients, it was unclear whether portal hypertension was present.
PBC was not expected to progress rapidly in these patients, yet they experienced accelerated clinical deterioration within months of starting obeticholic acid, the FDA said.
The median time to liver decompensation after initiating treatment was 4 months (range, 2 weeks to 10 months). Four patients with PBC and compensated cirrhosis needed a liver transplant within 1.3 years after starting obeticholic acid, and one patient died from liver failure.
The other seven cases of serious liver injury occurred in patients with PBC and decompensated cirrhosis, two of whom died.
Although there was a temporal relationship between starting obeticholic acid and liver injury, it is difficult to distinguish a drug-induced effect from disease progression in the patients with advanced baseline liver disease, the FDA cautioned.
The median time to a new decompensation event after starting the drug was 2.5 months (range, 10 days to 8 months).
Before starting obeticholic acid, clinicians should determine whether a patient with PBC has advanced cirrhosis as the drug is now contraindicated in these patients, the FDA said.
During obeticholic acid treatment, patients should be routinely monitored for progression of PBC with laboratory and clinical assessments to determine whether the drug needs to be discontinued.
The medication should be permanently discontinued in patients with cirrhosis who progress to advanced cirrhosis.
Patients should also be monitored for clinically significant liver-related adverse reactions that may manifest as development of acute-on-chronic liver disease with nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, jaundice, scleral icterus, and/or dark urine.
Obeticholic acid should be stopped permanently in any patient who develops these symptoms, the FDA advised.
Healthcare professionals are encouraged to report adverse events or side effects related to the use of obeticholic acid to MedWatch, FDA’s adverse event reporting site.
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Some Disabled People Lose Disability Benefits After Stimulus Checks
Posted on May 25, 2021 by Pharmaciststeve
in reading this… it may more apply to those folks that get both Medicare disability monies and are also eligible for Medicaid assistance.
Some Disabled People Lose Disability Benefits After Stimulus Checks
https://themighty.com/2021/05/disability-benefits-stimulus-checks-chronic-illness/
When the United States government approved sending stimulus checks to American citizens and residents during the COVID-19 pandemic, many people were relieved. Due to layoffs, cut hours and parents having to leave work to take care of their kids, many people have been struggling.
What was supposed to help Americans is now hurting some members of the disability community. HuffPost reported last week that the stimulus checks have caused some people to lose disability benefits.
Supplemental Security Income recipients are not allowed to have more than $2,000 for one person at a time or $3,000 for a couple. The program also only provides people $794 a month, and it can take years for disabled people to even be approved.
As stimulus checks are counted under tax credits, they should not affect people’s eligibility to receive Supplemental Security Income. “The whole point of stimulus was to help people who were being harmed during COVID, and now there’s going to be people facing a cessation of benefits and they’re going to end up in a worse place,” Michelle Spadafore, senior supervising attorney with the New York Legal Assistance Group, told HuffPost.
The exact number of recipients who lost their disability benefits is unknown. Joseph Morris told HuffPost that he lost his Supplemental Security Income because he had more than $2,000 in his bank account after receiving a stimulus check. HuffPost reported that “starting next month, Social Security will take 10% out of Morris’ monthly benefits until it recoups the several thousand dollars the agency believes it overpaid him last year.” Morris was understandably upset, and he said the following:
You’re going to give me a stimulus check to stimulate the economy, and I can’t go out under doctor’s orders and you’re penalizing me for having this money. Now it’s going to cost me money to have this money.
Grace Kim, an acting assistant deputy commissioner for Social Security, said that the department is looking into this issue, but did not give an estimate of when disabled people who lost their benefits should receive them again.
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