CDC Blames Fentanyl for Spike in Overdose Deaths

Posted on March 30, 2018 by Pharmaciststeve

www.painnewsnetwork.org/stories/2018/3/29/cdc-blames-fentanyl-for-spike-in-overdose-deaths March 29, 2018 By Pat Anson, Editor The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a new report today estimating that 63,632 Americans died of a drug overdose in 2016 – a 21.5% increase over the 2015 total.   The sharp rise in drug deaths is blamed largely on illicit fentanyl, a powerful synthetic […]

Filed under: General Problems | 1 Comment »

What Are the 12 Leading Causes of Death in the United States?

Posted on March 30, 2018 by Pharmaciststeve

https://www.healthline.com/health/leading-causes-of-death#1 For more than a decade, heart disease and cancer have claimed the first and second spots respectively as the leading causes of deaths in America. Together, the two causes are responsible for 46 percent of deaths in the United States. Combined with the third most common cause of death, chronic lower respiratory diseases, the […]

Filed under: General Problems | Leave a Comment »

How Many Opioid Overdoses Are Suicides?

Posted on March 30, 2018 by Pharmaciststeve

www.khn.org/news/difficult-to-gauge-rate-of-suicide-among-deaths-from-opioid-overdoses/ Mady Ohlman was 22 on the evening some years ago when she stood in a friend’s bathroom looking down at the sink. “I had set up a bunch of needles filled with heroin because I wanted to just do them back-to-back-to-back,” Ohlman recalled. She doesn’t remember how many she injected before collapsing, or how […]

Filed under: General Problems | Leave a Comment »

Is CMS proposal violating their own anti discriminatory policies ?

Posted on March 30, 2018 by Pharmaciststeve

CMS proposes to force patients off effective opioid doses without their physician’s approval Nondiscrimination https://www.cms.gov/about-cms/agency-information/aboutwebsite/cmsnondiscriminationnotice.html Nondiscrimination Notice CMS doesn’t exclude, deny benefits to, or otherwise discriminate against any person on the basis of race, color, national origin, disability, sex, or age in admission to, participation in, or receipt of the services and benefits under any of […]

Filed under: General Problems | Leave a Comment »

The anticipation of unrelieved pain could induce patients to avoid needed surgical procedures

Posted on March 30, 2018 by Pharmaciststeve

New Attitudes Toward Pain Amid the Opioid Crisis https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/893926 Backpedaling on Opioid Use To correct what they believe was an overly zealous approach to pain control that put patients at risk for opioid addiction, some physicians are now telling their patients to expect to have some pain. A recent article on Medscape explains that “Doctors […]

Filed under: General Problems | 6 Comments »

Palliative care is a right of all people in pain

Posted on March 30, 2018 by Pharmaciststeve

Palliative care is a right of all people in pain www.kevinmd.com/blog/2018/03/palliative-care-right-people-pain.html In 2017, The Lancet published a report on the international lack of palliative care. It is a tale of woe documenting the sorry state of unrelieved global suffering. Everywhere “people live and die with little or no palliative care or pain relief.” It describes […]

Filed under: General Problems | 3 Comments »