According to the latest available data from the Centers for Disease Control, drug overdoses were responsible for 38,329 deaths in 2010, 30,006 of which were unintentional.That’s a rate of 105 every day, and that number doesn’t take into account the 6,748 people treated every day for the misuse or abuse of drugs.
In comparison, traffic accidents were responsible for 33,687 deaths in 2010. Firearms killed 31,672 people, and 26,852 died as a result of falling.
How very interesting…Especially interesting are those deaths attributed to falls, obviously legislation is needed ASAP…
Actually, you should thank your doctors for this epidemic - especially primary care providers who make a killing (pun intended) treating chronic pain, anxiety, and “bipolar” with short-acting narcotics and benzodiazepines. I say they are making a killing because deaths due to prescription drugs, namely narcotics and benzodiazepines such as Oxycodone and Xanax, have this year eclipsed the COMBINED deaths due to street drug overdoses and motorvehicle collisions. 30 years ago a family doctor could go days without prescribing a narcotic; nowadays they would starve without a DEA license. It gives a new meaning to the Motley Crüe song “Dr. Feel Good.”
You see, this mess got started by one asshole anesthesiologist named Russell Portenoy used blatantly faulty studies to push the notion that narcotics could be used to treat non-cancer pain with no chance of addiction. He was also the dickhead who argued for a pain score (you know, the 1-10 score every nurse asks you after sticking a thermometer up your ass) being included as a 5th vital sign. Well, it should come as no surprise to anyone that this quack had financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry including the origional manufacturer of Oxycodone. It gets better, the medical community followed this Pied Piper because it created a whole new medical industry of pain management to bill 3rd party payers.
Even emergency physicians are in on the scheme as most freely overprescribe Vicoden, Percocet, and others for minor sprains and vague pain complaints in order to keep their patient satisfaction scores high (and hence their monthly bonuses). That’s right, pscription narcotics are now the most frequently prescribed medications in emergency departments with 60% of discharged adults leaving with a narcotic as a firstline analgesic. It has gotten so bad that denying a frequent flyer their drugs in most ED’s draws an immediate complaint to hospital administration since drug seekers understand that enough complaints will threaten any doctors job. That is because hospitals compete for emergency department visits even among Medicaid patients in certain states.
Here are some links if you want to learn about how we got to where we are today. It is a great lesson on how America’s doctors have transformed a disease into disability, and sometimes a life-threatening condition.
Kinda reminds of the whole HCAHPS nonsense and the notion that ones medical competencies are irrelevant so long as the patient likes their treatment provider…
1st grade we did in public school ! was OK but we homeschool now
my kid gets nose bleeds really bad and had to go pick her up one time when I got to the nurse office noticed a cabinet that had about 150 pill bottles or more ! looked like longs drug store !
asked her what those were all for she said the kids she was older like me and I asked about it and they have to keep all these kids on there scripts during the day was shocked at how many and she said its insane and you could tell it kinda bugged her
now relate that to mommy daddy with tons of pills kids are OK with it they help you in there mind so mommy daddy pills must be better !
Yeap, the idea is to start young, the younger the better. My mother was approached by my First Grade teacher (in the early (80’s). She wanted my parents to put me on Methylphenidate (aka Ritalin), mom replied “he’s a little boy, he is supposed to act that way”. God I do love my mom.
The powers at be want the masses dependent upon government programs/handouts, stoned out of our minds on pills that the docs and Big Pharma peddle like street pushers, and they want Marijuana in every house hold so as to keep people’s limited attention spans off of what is really going on . . .
Walmart ain’t the only one who wants repeat customers. There is lots to be made from treating symptoms instead of root causes. The best part is that unless the root cause is identified the customer keeps coming back when the symptoms return.
Not saying that all docs are quacks and that chronic issues are make believe.
you cite an example of how your mother denied medication and this was a (personal) success.
then you claim that some abstract power wants to subjugate people with a multipronged attack on said people to perpetuate whatever is already going on.
is the abstract power not just the everyday, regular people who are too lazy to make good long term decisions like disciplining children, educating children, teaching good decision making, teaching good health practices, etc…
isn’t the lack of attention to producing good people the very thing that enables this drug pumping culture?
what do people say about the war on drugs? the problem is the demand? if the demand went away there would be no drugs? is this not the same for big pharma et al?
i suppose the root of my questioning is, where does the demand come from? oh yeah, people.
yeah kids are hyper they should be full of energy if they are not then something is wrong like they need to get out and do things
my brother was saying how pot limits certain social behavior growth and why many pot heads act like giggly kids !
guess its a proven scientific thing
and a lot of time he comes up against it when prosecuting and why idiots do the things they do
(he is a state prosecutor)
its the adds on TV that say ask your doctor about --------
well I guess if you have to ask your doc about meds he is not a very good doc ! he should know if you have a problem and prescribe it if needed not cause you asked
its the massive kick backs that docs get for prescribing things from the drug reps ! its the hey give out X amount of scrips and we will send you to Hawaii !
so docs do that
its the easy way out I dont want to deal with a kid being a kid so lets drug him down to behavior !
bottom line !
its so many things that have gone wrong and its the typical don’t take responsibility blame something or someone else culture that has happened ! or guess I am told to do this so it must be OK dont question authority just shut up and do what they say !
My mother did not deny me medication, she simply refused to poison her child.
You do realize that the likes of George Soros are personally funding the legalization of Marijuana and that Big Pharma is a multi-BILLION dollar industry. They’re not about “healing the sick”.
I may be a resident, but it sure didn’t take long before I was comfortable Rx morphine, hydrocodone, hydromorphone, Morphine sulfate, ect. Nurse want more narcotics, patients want more narcotics, and its easier to shuffle patients through if you do what they want. I refuse to even ask the 1-10 pain scale, it is such a joke.
I will say that most of the foreign medical grads prescribe a WHOLE lot less narcotics in their country (but they turn around quickly). My ID attending told me he wrote orders for 4mg of morphine his entire residency.
I tend to think ER docs here are some of the worse offenders here. At least they prescribe Dilaudid and meperidine pretty easily. Heck, they practice a lot more “primary care” than we do.
Very soon you will need to ask yourself if you are part of the problem or part of the solution. I appreciate that writing a script is a great way to make the problem at hand go away. However, doing this just perpetuates the larger problem that someone else must fix. All doctors face this dilemma - even pediatricians who confront the angry hoards of mothers wanting an antibiotic for little Johnny’s URI (in the 80’s we gave amoxicillin, in the 90’s it was Augmentin, now it is Omnicef…geezuuschrist).
Well, now we all know that lots of people are being hurt, and some of them even killed, with our Burger King have-it-your-way attitude. Perhaps it is time to start saying “no” to the significant majority of people who will get better without our “help.” After all, there is a reason why primary care physicians with the highest patient satisfaction scores also have the worst outcomes including the higher mortalities. Changing one’s practice to meet patient’s expectations means that a number of people are going to receive treatments they don’t need; that means all the risk of adverse affects with no chance of benefit.
I want to meet this big phrama you talk about because I have lumps on my spine, confirmed by MRI, and just to get a painkiller is to jump through hoops like mad. So nobody is dolling out chemicals like street dealers with MDs and Ph.Ds. so drop it.
