How I Exposed the Biggest Pharma Scandal of Our Lifetime
thefp.com
thefp.com
These are "pill mills" - doctors who are willing to hand out hundreds of tablets to whoever walked in their door for a large cash payment. We're talking about doctors who saw hundreds of patients per day, didn't actually examine them and then wrote prescriptions. Offices that had people lined up outside.
To call those doctors "well meaning" is laughable. They were entirely complicit in handing out powerful opioids for cash.
Why do these doctors get a pass? They're the ones that are supposed to be the gatekeepers for prescription opioids.
Punish Perdue for lying about their product, that’s fine.
But Oxycotin was always a schedule 2 drug - the most restrictive category for prescription drugs. Schedule 2 includes things like morphine, cocaine, barbiturates. Highly addictive medicines.
Perdue could lie all they want, but without doctors basically selling scripts of the stuff people wouldn’t have access to it.
I’m kind of surprised the DEA took that long to get on top of it. The data should have been clearly apparent like a year into the problem.
I think its scandalous that medical experts are still not able to quantify pain when visiting a GP.
They dont know if I'm eating a grain rich diet which is high in chromium and thus makes me feel pain more, or consuming large amounts of tryptophan or nicotinic acid/niacin which dulls the nociceptors in the brain. They dont even do a saliva test for the stress hormones!
With GP's not reviewing our diets, can they really claim to be experts, or do they recognise some of their drugs are such blunt instruments, they make sledgehammers look positively appropriate for chiselling Ming dynasty porcelain!
Govts are just legalised drug dealers!
It really shows how morally bankrupt our medical system is. How many people died while medical professionals took kickbacks and golf trips and steak dinners while rampantly overprescribing this stuff?
There was rampant defrauding of medicaid, huge surges of overdose deaths.
I broke (in seven places) my collarbone about 7 years ago and the number of different people (ambulance EMT, first nurse, doctor, radiologist) who kept offering me painkillers was frankly bizarre. Yes I was in pain, but I was fine with OTC acetominophen and ibuprofen, certainly not in pain to risk a lifelong addiction.
They of course sent me home from surgery with a bottle of the stuff, and I didn't need it. But the weird thing was that I was given some in postsurgery, and there was a bizarre faint desire to use them, such that I felt compelled to get rid of them and not have them in my residence.
The attitude of doctors saying "we didn't know they were addictive" is absolutely outrageous. There were 100,000+ people dying per year of opioids, and who knows if the stats are undercounts. A million Americans may have died from opioid overpresciption. Perhaps opioid deaths replaced heroin deaths. Perhaps heroin deaths were exacerbated by opioid overprescription.
Nevertheless, the medical establishment adopted the same "gee whiz I had no idea that was happening" as the CEO of Purdue Pharma. Except the medical establishment is full of ... medical experts.
It really shows how bankrupt our for-profit medical system is, how you can't take any advice from a doctor without considering how they are being manipulated by drug/device company incentives or insurance company limitations, how their medical opinion is fundamentally compromised.
There is no longer trust.
This was after they were cracking down on opiates so cymbalta became the next big thing. Now, there are issues coming about those drugs too. I don’t think it’s as bad as opiates though.
I have learned that many doctors just plainly don’t care. I have some in my family and they don’t see an issue with getting free shit from sales reps.
Take on an empty stomach 30mins before hitting the gym and that was an actual prescription and instruction from a USAF doctor!
It works, I've done 3grams over the course of a day and shifted 15 tonnes of soil using a spade with a bad back. Its better than any painkiller I've ever taken.