221–230 of 376 posts
Anyways, this just highlights the issue with the DEA. People should be able to fairly freely get pain medications. It's their choice and they should not have their freedom curtailed by professional gatekeepers and bureaucrats.
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> But I don't understand how people can be so pro marijuana on one hand, and so anti-opiates on the other. It's pain. It's not noble to suffer needlessly. Weed is not addictive, or even if it is in some people, to nowhere near the same level as opiates. It's also not responsible for thousands of overdose cases per year. It seems to me that THC pills would be better for pain management in these situations than opiate…
> I also don't think you have much personal experience people who have been addicted to opiates. I said as much. Which is a good enough reason to be suspicious of prohibition for me. And to be clear, I'd find it very difficult to believe anyone gets a two week supply of opiates after surgery and goes all Reefer Madness after following the directions on the prescription. You're talking about people who abuse the drug.…
The article is specifically about the effects of withdrawal when a 12 hour dose doesn't last 12 hours - when people are taking it by the prescribed schedule.
There is a difference between marketing and actual use. Its a synthetic opioid, which means it has all the variability of opioids. Any decent doctor should know this, and the guides, if they were any good will indicate it. For example codamol is now not prescribed in a hospital setting for under 5s, after one child died because they had large amounts of the enzyme required to processes it all at once. This caused res…
It sounds like they did, at first, and the manufacturer (ostensibly the experts on this particular drug) pushed back hard.
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I don’t think legalization will reduce addiction (though would defer to empirical studies here). It would make the economic cost of addiction lower for the individual – one problem instead of two. More importantly, it would make doctors (and regulators) more honest participants. If a doctor wants to recommend opiates, it would largely remove their economic incentives for doing so. We don’t think of doctors having muc…
> It would make the economic cost of addiction lower for the individual Isn't a low cost of addiction a bad thing? I'm also not just talking about legalization, but mainly the thing about deregulation/competition. I see your logic though, I hope it's not too wishful to assume that less doctors pushing drugs on patients will solve the issue. I suppose it definitely will cut it back some.
Less doctors "pushing" really means more doctors being very critical of patients. Which means more people in pain, scared to make too big a fuss, lest they be labeled an "addict" or "seeker".
We don't accept (in theory) a legal system that condemns innocent people to suffer, why should we accept a health system that does the same?
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I said opioids are a good option for short term pain. They are also usually (not always) a bad option for long term pain. Please go to a treatment facility (volunteer please) and talk to the patients there. It is beyond eye opening, I volunteered at one myself. I've seen pain medicine literary ruin lives, and it's so sad. These are people who have been through hell with their injuries, some of the worst I've ever see…
Yes, opiates can ruin lives. That is not the trump card you want it to be, sorry. If anything, the pushback against opiate prescribing has resulted in a lot of dependent patients (and addicted abusers) looking at heroin as a more potent, widely available, cheaper alternative. opiates have been around a long time for a good reason. they can give an unrivaled increase in the quality of life of those suffering. there wi…
I wonder if the accelerometer in a smartwatch could measure levels of pain in a patient? I wonder if tense muscles and other aspects of suffering could be measured and tracked. I suppose a smartphone app could ask the patient to tap one of the ten pain-level smiley - frowny - sweaty faces at intervals as well. If so, there'd be a way to measure how fast these painkillers clear from each patient. It might even make it…
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FDA approval shouldn't be determined by your ability to write product language effectively, but by your ability to do valuable research and to produce a useful product. If the FDA is approving drugs based on their advertising budget or methodology, then they're worthless.
Just like your salary compensation should be determined by the value you bring to your company, instead of how well you negotiate and get people to identify you as "one of us". Just like presidents should be decided by issues instead of how good looking they are. http://paulgraham.com/charisma.html The other agents in all of our interactions are humans. Fallible, emotional creatures, guided by an unimaginably complic…
So yes, humans are fallible, but the extent of this reliance on "knowing the right people" is the extent of the fallibility.
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Can you explain more how competition, availability, and legality will stop the more addiction-prone (low-income, chronic pain among other health problem) parts of society in America from doing drugs and becoming addicted? If I read your argument correctly, it's that the pharma firms will not market it as much and not profit as much. In my mind that's not enough reasoning that people who simply have a bad situation wo…
> addiction-prone (low-income Are low-income people more likely to become addicted? I'd like to see some statistics. A few thoughts: * There are many more low-income people than wealthy people, so low-income addicts may be greater in sheer numbers but not in rate. * I expect that addition tends to reduce income, so people who started wealthier may become low-income * Prescription opiods are by reputation the wealthy…
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Another way to look at it was in working with Purdue, he was able to demonstrate his ability to define and walk around FDA approvals by understanding and guiding product language to get approval. This is a valuable skill. Purdue probably wanted someone like that on their product development team who could influence drug design early on which would make it less costly and more efficient to get drugs approved in the fu…
> Another way to look at it was in working with Purdue, he was able to demonstrate his ability to define and walk around FDA approvals by understanding and guiding product language to get approval. Isn't subverting the system like that almost as improper as doing it from the other side? Not as obviously, possibly not as strongly, but from having been in research myself, knowing the little details like that is often g…