191–200 of 376 posts
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Ibuprofen is often prescribed (or just recommended) for its anti-inflammatory effects. (opiates and paracetamol do not have those effects)
Right, and I noticed that I was able to function better under ibuprofen instead of the hazy "sleep/wake" state you get with opiates.
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I don't get this mentality at all. I would guess a majority of adults in the US have had Vicodin or similar and I don't know anyone personally who ever got addicted. In some it causes nausea. You don't like it, fine. 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. It's complete BS that it's harder for a dentist to…
My point, which mirrored the point of the post to which I responded, wasn't that Vicodin wasn't useful in some cases. It was that it was overprescribed relative to the amount of pain of the particular procedure.
And if you have any pain at all after a medical procedure, I see no good reason responsible adults need to suffer at all if there's an inexpensive, effective, safe treatment for the vast majority of them.
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…
What about their push for higher, instead of more frequent, doses?
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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…
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 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 complicated, overlapping, self-contradicting set of heuristics optimized over millions of years to make us as effective as possible at creating more humans.
View any behavior approaching rationality as something to be treasured and appreciated, rather than the norm-- _Even within ourselves_. Even very smart people need prolonged introspection/mindfulness practice to become aware of how rarely we actually act as a rational being.
Wishing things were one way has no bearing on whether they are that way. We do ourselves a disfavor if we act as if the world worked the way we want it to rather than the way it does.
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I mean things like HPV vaccination. I'm not going to get my son vaccinated. This is an example of Merck and the other drug manufacturers manufacturing a vaccine to treat a low-risk disease. Pushing it on boys, as well, is simply expanding the market to get more money. When my daughter is old enough, she can get the vaccine, once we have figured out if there are long-term effects from this vaccine of if it's just scar…
You're saying if you could get rid of 10% of auto accident deaths with a one-off injection in childhood you wouldn't ?!
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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…
Really the duration can vary quite a lot. I was put under on fentanyl for having my wisdom teeth taken out and woke up in the middle of the operation in extreme pain as someone was digging my teeth out with a metal instrument. I moaned at him, through a mouth stuffed with gauze pads, to get the fuck off me and let me out of there if he wasn't giving me more meds. He proceeded to angrily accuse me of taking dope, whic…
Are you a redhead?
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I don't get this mentality at all. I would guess a majority of adults in the US have had Vicodin or similar and I don't know anyone personally who ever got addicted. In some it causes nausea. You don't like it, fine. 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. It's complete BS that it's harder for a dentist to…
> 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 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. Most people who drink don't become alcoholics.
Now maybe you also want to abolish alcohol, in that case I just don't see any common ground.
I've tried pot for a migraine before and it only made me more nauseous. I'd be willing to try it for other types of pain but it certainly wouldn't be my first choice. I find the side effects mostly unpleasant.
I find opiates far more effective at relieving pain (tooth, back, eye pain after PRK surgery, mouth surgery after a car accident), with the fewest side effects. (I've only had light nausea once.) Running out of medication at the end of a course is a non-issue (I actually almost never finish it), and I notice lower levels of impairment than even a single beer.
But I don't abuse it. I take the larger dosage (500 vs 325? I forget exactly), in a maximum of 4 hour intervals (IIRC), and usually whatever the reason for taking them has subsided to the point ibuprofen alone works fine after about 48-hours.
And you would suggest that should end, without a viable alternative, because some other people abuse it? That seems like a very puritanical position to me.
The best part of the article: "Dr. Curtis Wright, who led the agency’s medical review of the drug, declined to comment for this article. Shortly after OxyContin’s approval, he left the FDA and, within two years, was working for Purdue in new product development, according to his sworn testimony in a lawsuit a decade ago." Says it all doesn't it?
What does it say?
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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. 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…
I don't think so because the government created a regulatory environment that requires drug companies to find people like this that know how to get their drugs approved.
the regulatory environment only "requires" this if your drug doesn't work as advertised. The other way to get your drug approved is to, you know, not make phony claims about its efficacy.