Is our FLAG flying more at HALF-MAST than ever before ?   Given the STATE OF OUR UNION… should we just leave it at HALF-MAST ?

White lives matter

Blue lives matter

Black lives matter                          ONE NATION UNDER GOD ?

Pained lives matter

ad nauseam lives matter

26 police killed so far in 2016, up 44% from 2015

SHOULD THIS BE CONSIDERED A EPIDEMIC ?

 http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/07/08/nationwide-police-shooting-deaths/86861082/

The deaths of four Dallas police officers and one Dallas transit officer from sniper fire during a protest in the city Thursday raised the national total of firearm deaths among police to 26. This compares with 18 at this point in time in 2015, said Nick Breul, director of research for the fund in Washington, D.C.

Breul said it was also the latest of 11 ambushes of police officers so far this year across the country, already outpacing the eight ambushes of law enforcement that occurred last year.

“That’s certainly a concern for us. It’s troubling and it’s something that we watch,” Breul, a former Washington, D.C., police officer, said about the shootings. “It’s really an assassination. You’re taking advantage of an officer and you’re ensuring that you’re able to kill them through them either being vulnerable or through a complete surprise attack.”

USA TODAY

Dallas shooting is the latest American nightmare

 

Breul said the last major ambush targeting police occurred at a coffee shop in Lakewood, Wash. on Nov. 29, 2009, when a gunman walked in and opened fire on four city police officers working on their laptop computers preparing for their work shifts. All four were killed. The gunman died two days later in a shootout with police.

USA TODAY

5 police officers killed in Dallas ambush: What we know

 

Forty-one officers were killed with guns last year. The largest, annual number of police officers shot and killed nationally in the past ten years was 70, who were killed in 2007, according to the memorial fund website.

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As many of my readers know, I had some issues with blood clots back in May and ended up in the hospital for 3 days.. my longest hospital stay in 60+ yrs.

All of the doctors dealing with this issues ( PCP, Cardiologist, Hematologist) are scratching their heads as to reason I developed all of these clots, but in looking back… I was one sick puppy 🙁

To deal with the clots I ended up on taking Coumadin/Warfarin and still taking it.  Also having to deal with the blood tests and dietary restrictions. I did not wanted to take the non-warfarin medications Paradax, Xarelto or Eliquis… in my professional opinion there are a lot of problems with these medications that – IMO – the manufacturers are not being honest and forthcoming about.

So I had to stop taking my NSAID and there was recent studies that suggested that Tylenol/Acetaminophen would interfere with Warfarin.  Without some sort of anti-inflammatory, both my knees started to demonstrate how well the NSAID was working.

I have and can get opiates from our PCP, but was seeking some other means of reducing my knee pain. Not that I was concerned about addiction or the need to have increasing doses, the smart way to treat any pain is with the least “troublesome” product.

I had seen AUSTRALIAN DREAM  advertised on TV and really had not paid much attention to it.. had no reason to consider it. While I was at the pharmacy last week, I found the product on their shelf and decided to give it a try… they claim a 100% refund – even if you send them a empty bottle – if you are not happy with how it works..

I am not aware of any other topical cm/oint that contains the active ingredient in AUSTRALIAN DREAM.  After using it for a few days, it seems to provided substantial temporary relief and Barb has tried it on some isolated painful areas on her back/shoulders and likewise it has provided relief.

This does not mean that it will work everyone and every sore spot,but with a 100% money back guarantee… how can you go wrong ?

In reading the product label.. the “back pain cream” has twice the active ingredient (double strength) of the “arthritis pain” version.

Unfortunately, this product is not inexpensive… on Amazon I found 4 oz of each strength for abt $24.00

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The Epidemic of Bad Policies On Prescription Opioids

www.slideshare.net/IDHDP/us-opioid-policy-epidemic?dm_i=1KB6,4CEW6,ILTEUB,FXK2I,1

http://www.slideshare.net/IDHDP/us-opioid-policy-epidemic?dm_i=1KB6,4CEW6,ILTEUB,FXK2I,1

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IMO… DELL COMPUTER owner database has been hacked

I got a phone call tonight from someone representing themselves as with Dell computers and telling me that my Dell laptop computer was sending out “errors” and they could help me fix it..

I can normally outsmart these people .. I ask for the MAC address of the computer that they claim they are claiming that there is a problem with..  that normally gets them to hangup on me and go away…

Since this particular call stated that it was a DELL LAPTOP that was the problem.. I asked for the Service Tag number… which is on the underside of Dell’s laptop computers… I checked my laptop and the service tag number of my laptop did not match…

So I walked downstairs and looked at Barb’s and asked the woman to repeat the Service Tag number.. and the number she rattled off… MATCHED BARB’S LAPTOP…  In reality, with her computer … anything is possible … upgrades not done or just about any other issue is possible.

I have owned various Dell computers for some 20+ yrs and have never had them call me about computer issues.. giving me the correct Service Tag… both spooked and confused me…  I told the woman calling that she had caught me in the middle of eating dinner and that I could call her back…  She said that the 800 number listed on my cell phone would not receive calls… when is the last time you heard about a “800 number” that was not for inbound calls ???

Got off the call and called Dell… apparently this is a on going SCAM that Dell is aware of… apparently they ask for your credit card and promise to “FIX” what is wrong with your computer for a promised “modest charge” and then your credit card number gets stuffed with charges..

What I was told by Dell was to call the FTC 877-382-4357 and file a complaint.. which I did.

IMO, the only way that they had both my cell number and the Service Tag off of Barb’s laptop and knew the model number of the laptop is for them to hack Dell’s customer’s database… Since my name and cell number is not in Barb’s computer.

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It is reported that our nation has a NINETEEN TRILLION DOLLAR national debt.. that figures out to abt $60,000 for every man, woman, child. Since the USA is a country “for/by the people” that means that “we the people” really owes this debt.
It is reported that 47% of the households pays no Federal Income Taxes. Which suggests that there is no way that they could  begin to contribute to paying off their share of the debt.
Some claim to just “take it from the rich”, but when you do the math… if you confiscated ALL THE ASSETS of millionaires, billionaires and it would pay MAYBE 10% of that national debt.

During the last 8 yrs.. our national debt has increased about 10 trillion. Since during that time frame there have been two year periods where each party has been in the majority.. so both parties are equally at fault.

Is the American electorate so uninformed that we just keep sending the same bozos back to Congress and State legislatures?  45% of the eligible voters DID NOT VOTE in the last Presidential election.

Those that are paying attention, has seen just how much there is an “establishment” within Congress and many within that establishment are just not happy that one of theirs is not the “choice of the people” .  Which would strongly suggests that the “establishment” is admitting that they have no intention of representing their constituents.

We are seeing the reporting of more and more OD deaths from Fentanyl… which we/everyone knows is coming from Mexico and China. So why hasn’t increased manpower being devoted to preventing this illegal drug getting to the streets ? So the Congress, state legislatures and others are passing laws that makes Narcan/Naloxone to be OTC… “save the addict” and at the same time passing laws that are harming the chronic pain community and causing all too many to commit suicide because they have no other solution to their unrelenting chronic pain.

We have “crazies” that are killing our cops in our country and innocent people in other countries… and seems to be escalating.  Apparently in the last 24 hrs someone sent out a tweet that police needs to “clean house” of “bad cops”.. and we have all worked in businesses where there are one or more people that are not part of the team and doesn’t follow the rules.  They criticized the tweet, shouldn’t the police … police themselves and getting rid of cops that are not mentally/psychologically suitable to be a cop ? 

There is no chance of having any changes in how those in the chronic pain community are treated unless we have a dramatic change in the member of the House and Senate. Otherwise the ingrained “establishment” will continue on the path they have been on for some time. They will continue to try and “save the addict” while the DEA continues to focus on their war on pts and prescribers… while Meth, Fentanyl, Heroin and other illegal drugs keep flooding the country thru our open borders.

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The state legislature and AG’s seem to have a game plan that they keep bringing out.

A few years ago a small pharmaceutical company brought out a opiate product call Zohydro and basically all it was .. was a long acting (12 hr) Hydrocodone WITHOUT any Acetaminophen/Tylenol.  Came in various strengths from 10 mg to 50 mg.

The anti-opiate groups reacted like a bunch of “rabid dogs”.. they told the media that it was some sort of “death med”… they jumped to comparing the lowest dose of  Vicodin/Norco that was prescribed – 5 mg.. to the most potent strength of the Zohydro 50mg.  Since many chronic pain pts take 4-6 Norco 10/day.. a total of 40 mg – 60 mg.. their reaction was nothing short of irrational hysteria .

State after state starting passing rules about how Zohydro could be prescribed/dispensed.. some even tried to ban its sale in their state.  Because all of this “banning” was done at the state level, the company producing this product had to challenge the rules at the various state level. What state AG’s succeeded in doing was bankrupting the company because the company was force to  fight legal Goliaths in numerous states at the same time.

IMO.. it looks like they are trying the same “game” with limiting opiates to pain pts.. more and more states..plus the Feds are creating rules/limitations.  Early this year, there was a published survey where 90% of the family with a chronic pain pt member. The disease itself and/or the cost of treating the disease was causing a financial hardship on the family.

So it would appear that these “bureaucratic bullies” are creating a “mine field” of state and Federal level obstacles for chronic pain pts to get thru. It is going to take a battalion of attorneys and a Fort Knox pile of money to individually challenge all of these laws.

If your life is not being impacted by all these opiate dosing limitation, but all means… vote to keep the current legislature in place. If you don’t have “deep pockets” to help fund the challenges to all of these unconstitutional laws/rules/regulations… then perhaps you need to consider voting to “clean house”… a legislature can just as easily REPEAL an existing law as they can pass a new law.

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Law to cap opioid prescriptions goes into effect Friday

http://wtnh.com/2016/06/29/law-to-cap-opioid-prescriptions-goes-into-effect-friday/

HARTFORD, Conn. (WTNH) — If you have an opioid prescription, things are about to change. A bill that will shorten prescriptions to just seven days has been approved and will go into effect Friday.

Mothers held photos, telling tragic stories of losing children to heroin, an addiction they say started with pain pills, as Governor Malloy signed a new law hoping to cut down on the number of opioid pain pills on the street. Starting Friday, the new Connecticut law restricts doctors and only allows them them to prescribe seven days worth of opioid pain medicine at a time.

Sen. Dante Bartolomeo representing Middletown and Meriden, says she believes doctors were way over-prescribing the pain pills.

“We have been hearing that often if a child is going to have their wisdom teeth out, that is something that is really common, they will give a 30-day supply and there is just no need for that,” said Bartolomeo.

Dr. Craig Allen is the Medical Director at Rushford. He believes the lawmakers are on the right track and it is a step in the right direction as they’re able to get as many loose pills as they can off the street.

“The research shows that 3 to 5 days worth of these opioid pain medications is generally enough for a surgical procedure,” said Allen.

Dr. Allen says if there is still significant pain after 3 to 5 days, the patient should see the doctor anyway, not take more pain pills, because the pain pills are dangerously addictive, and can hide bigger health problems.

“It’s not masked by a larger prescription of pills, which someone may take or they may not take and they go on the shelf and they go in the medicine cabinet and then they get out on the street,” said Allen.

The law also allows all first responders to carry Narcan, a life-saving drug for someone overdosing on heroin.

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AG locked in prolonged battle with drug companies

http://www.concordmonitor.com/NH-attorney-general-battle-with-drug-companies-3424021

It sounds like to me that the AG of  NH believes that the doctors in NH are not bright enough to know that OPIATES have a POTENTIAL to be addicting.  And these same doctors have been convinced by some marketing program to disregard what they should have learned in medical school about the potential for opiates to be addicting.  Maybe the AG should be asking the NH medical licensing board to suspend/revoke the medical licenses of all of these prescribers ?

One year after the state attorney general’s office filed subpoenas against five large drug companies to discover how addictive painkillers have been marketed in the state, the pharmaceutical giants have handed over nothing more than legal briefs.

“They’ve yet to produce one piece of paper,” said Assistant Attorney General James Boffetti, who is heading up the state’s investigation against the drug companies.

Boffetti’s three-person team is badly outnumbered by lawyers representing the pharmaceutical companies as they fight to get access to internal company documents. The attorney general’s office announced last month it was narrowing its probe to just look at Purdue Pharma LP, which manufactures the opioid OxyContin.

In a lawsuit filed in Merrimack County Superior Court, the attorney general’s office accuses Purdue of engaging in deceptive marketing, misrepresenting the “risks and benefits of long-term opioid use for chronic pain.”

“Purdue sales representatives continue to make sales visits to New Hampshire doctors during which they misleadingly portray or omit the risk of addiction,” wrote Boffetti, adding that the company made 217 marketing visits to the state in 2014, the most recent year with available data.

Boffetti characterizes the legal fight as a “David and Goliath” situation. The state – without any outside assistance – has three lawyers working on the investigation. The pharmaceutical companies have 19.

“They have a virtual army of lawyers, from New Hampshire and outside,” said Boffetti, who is charge of the state investigation. “It’s not just their lawyers, they have the resources of their entire law offices.”

Boffetti’s old boss is one of those lawyers. Former New Hampshire attorney general Michael Delaney is representing Endo Pharmaceuticals Inc., which recently settled with the state of New York over deceptive marketing practices of an opioid it manufactured, Opana ER.

Delaney served as attorney general in New Hampshire from 2009 to 2013.

Boffetti said his office needs help to sort through reams of documents if they come in.

“The volume of stuff to come in will be enormous,” he said.

Boffetti and his team are after internal documents from Purdue Pharma they hope will shed light on how prescription opioids were marketed to doctors and health providers in New Hampshire.

The current legal fight is whether the attorney general’s office can hire outside help.

All of the drug companies have refused to turn over any internal documents, as long as the attorney general’s office works with hired counsel – Cohen Milstein – a firm that has litigated similar cases against the pharmaceutical industry.

Lawyers representing the drug companies have argued Cohen Milstein has an inherent bias against them because it will only get paid if the state takes future legal action against the drug companies. A Merrimack County Superior Court judge recently sided with the state, but the drug companies are refusing to budge.

Lawyers have appealed the decision to the state Supreme Court and argue they should not have to turn over any internal documents until that decision is handed down.

“They don’t want us to know, that’s for sure,” Boffetti said. “We can have no resources; they’ll do everything they can to prevent us from seeing the documents.”

Elsewhere, light is starting to shine on Purdue’s marketing practices. An ongoing Los Angeles Times investigation into Purdue Pharma revealed the company marketed OxyContin as a pill to provide users with 12 hours of pain relief, despite the company’s own studies that showed the drug wore off hours early in many participants, leaving withdrawal symptoms and cravings.

The Times investigation found that Purdue knew OxyContin didn’t last 12 hours before the drug went onto the market.

Nevertheless, the drug maker not only stuck to their claim that the 12-hour window worked, it advised doctors to prescribe stronger doses of the drug if patients complained they weren’t getting the full window of relief, the Times reported.

Furthermore, the paper’s investigation found that Purdue knew of doctors who were overprescribing vast amounts of OxyContin potentially headed for the black market – and frequently did not share that information with law enforcement or cut off the supply.

Purdue Pharma keeps its own database of over 1,800 doctors it suspects are overprescribing, but does not alert law enforcement or medical authorities.

Boffetti said he can’t comment on whether similar overprescribing of OxyContin has gone on in New Hampshire, as the investigation is ongoing. But he said getting internal company documents will be an important piece of that.

“We need to get to the bottom of what they did so we can figure out if they violated the law,” he said.

These types of accusations aren’t new to Purdue. The Connecticut-based company agreed in 2007 to pay $600 million in federal fines after admitting it misled doctors and patients by understating OxyContin’s addictiveness. A federal prosecutor said at the time that the marketing had resulted in rising crime rates, teenage drug addiction and death, among other public health concerns.

Annual revenue at Purdue is about $3 billion, mostly due to OxyContin sales, according to Forbes. The company has made more than $35 billion since releasing OxyContin in 1995.

(Ella Nilsen is at 369-3322, enilsen@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @ella_nilsen.)

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‘This Is Why People Hate Congress’: What We Heard This Week

http://www.medpagetoday.com/InfectiousDisease/GeneralInfectiousDisease/59126

“You make it too complicated, you’re going to lose physicians.” — Thomas Eppes, Jr, MD, of Central Virginia Family Physicians, in Lynchburg, Va., on implementation of MACRA.

“This is just one of the most unfair things I’ve ever seen.” — Clarey Dowling, MD, a primary care physician in rural Tennessee, on the state Medicaid program’s insistence that he pay back $200,000 because he isn’t board certified.

“We have clearly heard from arthritis patients in both on-reserve and in urban settings that negative healthcare experiences in specialty care leads to a decision to disengage from further contact with rheumatologists.” — Cheryl Barnabe, MD, of the University of Calgary in Canada, on the prevalence of inflammatory arthritis and healthcare use among First Nations people in Canada.

“If you understand the mechanisms for a particular molecular target, you can develop devices that use electrons to replace drugs.” – Kevin J. Tracey, MD, of the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, N.Y., on vagus nerve stimulation for rheumatoid arthritis.

“Although cigarettes are still the most commonly used tobacco product, we are seeing the use of other forms of tobacco increasing, which is why it is important to address all forms of tobacco use among adults, not just cigarettes.” – Brian A. King, PhD, of the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, on survey results showing that one in four adults still use tobacco products.

“This is why people hate Congress. This is why people hate Washington.” — Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) on the Senate’s inability to pass a Zika funding bill.

“There’s that space opera I always wanted to write.” — Lydia Kang, MD, a novelist and internal medicine physician in Omaha, Neb., joking about her future plans as a writer.

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