https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/i-team-pain-med-prescriptions-did-not-cause-opioid-epidemic-courts-rule/

LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — Five years after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention initiated a crackdown on opioid pain medications, experts have concluded the policy has been a miserable failure. Overdose deaths have gone up, not down, and now, courts are starting to recognize the arguments used to justify the crackdown are largely bogus.

“So these numbers, they just push these false numbers and now you have courts of law calling them out,” said Dr. Dan Laird. 

As a Las Vegas physician, Laird has a unique vantage point from which to evaluate the great opioid crackdown.  Laird is a pain management doctor and an attorney who represented patients who suffered pain after being denied legal medications. 

Of the 50 million Americans plagued by chronic pain, about 20 million depend on prescription opioids to try and lead somewhat normal lives. Since 2016, those millions have suffered immensely because of a war on legal pain meds. 

“Chronic pain patients are basically in a fight for their lives,” Laird said. “They’ve been under attack for several years now with this. Anti-opioid sentiment and sort of the over-reaction to the opioid crisis.”

Laird says the campaign against opioids is largely about money. More than 1,500 civil lawsuits have been filed against drug companies by state and local governments, including in Nevada, as officials and trial lawyers eye multi-billion dollar settlements. but the lawsuits, most of which accuse big pharma of being a public nuisance for causing the opioid epidemic are starting to fall apart.

In California this month, a lower court tossed out a huge lawsuit with a scathing opinion that found the underlying facts don’t support the allegation that 25% of opioid patients get addicted. And in Oklahoma, the state’s supreme court reached a similar conclusion and held that the benefits of opioid meds far outweigh the risks.   

“But the litigation narrative, the narrative that the trial lawyers want to push is that it’s prescribed opioids that are causing all of these deaths. This huge upswing in opioid deaths has occurred because of fentanyl, yet they continue to pound this drum that it’s prescription opioids, causing the deaths and the reason they are is because this is being driven by litigation by the people involved in this. Aren’t talking about millions of dollars, they’re talking about billions and billions of dollars. So if it hurts a few chronic pain patients … and if they’re collateral damage, you know, I guess they look at it as you’ve got to break a few eggs to make an omelet,” Laird said. 

But prescription drugs are not the cause of a spike in overdose deaths. Ninety thousand overdoses were recorded in 2020, a huge increase, but 87% of those were caused by illegal street drugs, notably fentanyl and heroin, not a prescription medication. Cutting down on prescriptions hasn’t worked because legal pain patients are not the ones overdosing. 

One outspoken advocate for chronic pain patients, Red Lawhern, says the CC’s own statistics prove the crackdown on prescription opioids is unwarranted.

“So seniors, who get the most opioid prescribing have the lowest rates of opioid overdose-related deaths by a factor of three to one,” Lawhern told Mystery Wire. “Kids under the age of 19 have the lowest prescription rates for opioids. And they have a rate of opioid-related overdose death, that is three times that of seniors.
So what I’ve been telling people for the last roughly four years is that you can’t explain this inversion of demographics, by any model that proposes that prescribing is the problem or the cause of addiction. It’s not there, it has never been there. So what we are seeing is, statistics of the CDC itself demonstrate that the logic behind the 2016 guidelines is bogus. It’s flat not supported by the data that CDC itself has reported. But CDC has chosen to ignore the data, and instead to enlist the opinions of people who were hand-picked as anti-opioid advocates, who may even believe the nonsense that they talk. But they’re lying through their teeth.” 

Studies show less than 1% of them become addicted, not 25% as alleged in the lawsuits. Millions of patients who followed the rules and their doctors have been cut off altogether or had their dosages slashed. Suicides among those patients jumped 470%, many of them veterans in pain who were cut off by the Veterans Administration. Patients are starting to fight back by suing doctors and hospitals who deny legitimate medications.  

Also coming under scrutiny are the very same anti-opioid crusaders who crafted the CDC’s opioid crackdown in 2016. Several are now working as expert witnesses in lawsuits against big pharma. 

“One person, Andrew Kolodny, who is a psychiatrist with no formal postgraduate training and pain management is an expert witness for again, Oklahoma case against Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceuticals. His expert witness fee for that case reportedly is $500,000, so it’s pretty good work if you can get it,” Laird said.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments whether doctors should be criminally prosecuted for prescribing legal medications, so long as they use “good faith” standards in issuing prescriptions.

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In Dec 1941 the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and killed about 2300 people and we declared war against the Japanese and ended up fighting Germany/Hitler as well…

In Sept 2011, when the Towers and the Pentagon was attacked abt 3000 people died and we declared war

During his administration President Nixon declared that “addiction is public enemy number one” and he declared a war on drugs. Actually Nixon was a racist and didn’t like Blacks or those “Hippie types”… and that was the focus of his “war”.  When this happened the NY Mafia controlled the vast majority of illegal drugs distribution.

I am binge watching Narco Wars on National Geographic and Congress has routinely passed laws that has pushed the production of illegal abuse substances out of the country… mostly to Mexico and for decades China has been a source for most of the chemicals that is used to make some of these illegal substances.

Today, it is claimed that abt 75,000/yr OD deaths from illegal drugs coming from China & Mexico…  so in about 10 days as many people die as did in the attach on Pearl Harbor and in about 15 days the number of people that died in the 911 attack. Realistically we can’t declare war on China or Mexico. China has declared the making illegal Fentanyl is ILLEGAL and the penalty is pretty stiff.. but they don’t seem to be doing a very good job in stopping these chemical labs.

Our Congress has been consistent in how they deal with things that the Puritanical thread in our societal fabric considers “evil”… they first try to ban it and then when that fails they legalize it and tax it.  They have done it with Tobacco, Alcohol, Gambling and now MJ.  Often the taxes and fees to those who sell the particular product is so high, that the “cartels” can sell the product much cheaper and still make “boat loads of money”.

Many understand that addictions – all addictions – have a mental health component – we have some 30-40 million people addicted/abusing to some substance or activity.  We could use the same tactics that Standard Oil used in the early 20th century to get rid of competition… under price the competition.  We could take the illegal substances that we confiscate from the cartels… get a pharma or chemical company to standardize the product and get a pharma or other company to produce a standardized potency product to be provided to those who are going to find a way to get their “drug of choice”

Take alcohol as an example, the use/abuse of alcohol contributes to abt 100,000/yr deaths, but only abt 1,000 die from alcohol toxicity (OD). Could that be because the person abusing/addicted to alcohol… knows their limits and is able to get their “drug of choice” in a standardized potency.

We can go back to 2015 when Scottsburg, IN had a 200+ breakout of  HEP B & C and HIV + https://www.pharmaciststeve.com/another-good-example-of-how-well-drug-prohibition-works/ because of sharing needles..  and the lifetime costs to treat each of these people could upward of $750,000 EACH… Scottsburg had a free needle exchange program until this year when the “local bureaucrats” decided that they were encouraging/condoning substance abuse. Of course, being a small, poor rural county it wasn’t their tax money that was going to pay for the medical treatment cost for those people.

How far could the 100 billion that we spend on the war on drugs go to provide – at low cost – to attempt to SHRINK the demand of illegal substances that some people like to abuse and perhaps put the cartels back on their heels

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Complete government and insurance industry control over healthcare clear now in 2016 HFPP

by Felix Brizuela | Nov, Sun, 2021 | Chronic Pain Patient, Convicted physician, government benefiting off street opiates, Government Misconduct, health insurance, healthcare reform, Licensed to Lie, opiates | 0 comments

https://doctorsofcourage.org/complete-government-and-insurance-industry-control-over-healthcare-clear-now-in-2016-hfpp/

Doctors of courage, through the freedom of information act, were able to obtain close to 300 pages of information, considered classified and for “insiders” only, concerning the HFPP or Healthcare fraud and prevention partnership designed to address what has been considered the prescription opiate crisis, which was felt to be solely responsible for rising abuse and deaths from opiates. Keep in mind that there is now inequivocal proof that prescription opiates accounted for less than 1% of opiates abused. This was released October 20, 2021 the policies of which the federal government, in conjunction with government agencies, using agencies such as the FBI, DEA, state medical boards have been implicating to control what they called, “fraud, abuse and waste”. Through the enforcement of policies from the “white papers”, which were policies enforced though the Trump administration, through collaboration of Jeff Sessions, Qlarant (a high technology company that uses computer technology to obtain information about patients, doctors and pharmacies without consent violating their ourth amendment rights), the health insurance industry and an organization of physicians, PROP with no formal training in policies being addressed and who are opposed to use of opiates for long term pain management and who’s policies are now being scrutinized by the press.

The white papers utilize the 2016 CDC guidelines on opiate prescribing to justify classifying opiate use as “fraud, abuse and waste” by misinterpreting these guidelines as “laws” set forth by the CDC, which the CDC in it’s July 2021 meeting, which I attended and spoke at, adamantly deny that these were meant to be anything but guidelines. Emphasizing that the ultimate decision was between the doctor and the patient at this meeting. So in retrospect, the Trump administration “strong armed” policy to criminalize use of opiates which they felt was not appropriate. No input from chronic pain groups and organizations like the chronic pain society, the AMA, physicians with respected publications on chronic pain management or certification boards such as the American Academy of Psychiatry and Neurology or the ABEM (American Academy of Emergency Physicians) who provide certification of pain management for physicians. By using the “white paper” guidelines, this gives the government clout to define the misuse of opiates by whatever definition they feel is appropriate. By placing opiate “misuse” under the umbrella of fraud, waste and abuse, this allows for criminalization of prescribing of opiates and leaves physicians, pharmacists and other health care personal criminally liable for any prescribing of opiates for any use. Even medication assisted treatment (MAT) for drug addiction with use of methadone, naloxone or buprenorphine. The white papers are of the opinions that opiates should be used only for MAT, cancer patients but still criminalize use of opiates regardless.

The HFPP partnership includes mainly federal and local government agencies and insurance companies such the blues cross organizations such as Highmark, as well as Humana and Keiser Permanente and many others. No physicians, other healthcare workers, AMA, certification organizations or any other, non-biased well respected Healthcare organization were asked to be in the partnership. Clearly an example of its intention to maintain control of the health, well being of the American public strictly between the government and insurance industry. Including who lives or dies. The HFPP does not limit it’s regulation to opiate use, but it leaves open the definition of “fraud, waste and abuse” to any action they feel compromises their agenda. Which is unequivocally meant to maximize profit for the health insurance industry at the expense of American lives. A recent article published in the New England Journal of Medicine, dated October 28, 2021 emphasized how treatment of chronic disease, the cornerstone of healthcare, has been so compromised that our lifespan has once again fallen. Yet health insurance industry is making record profits, $500 billion in 2020 the highest ever by allowing Americans to get sick by avoiding chronic care and making money off expensive procedures and cancer care. Chronic pain falls under the umbrella of chronic disease and care. Unaddressed chronic disease is the number one cause of chronic pain through facilitation of central pain pathways https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2750819/. Which is why the USA leads the world in chronic pain and thus, leading the world in prescribing of opiates.

The HFPP only emphasizes and condones opiate use for pain in cancer pain. They do acknowledge that their is concern in public opinion about “chronic pain’, but are of the opinion that the consequences of use of opiates for chronic pain outweigh the benefits. An opinion without scientific merit. Cancer is a multibillion dollar industry from which health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, Oncologists and large healthcare conglomerations like Keiser and UPMC benefit and make the emphasis of most of their advertising. Cancer is very very very serous, but so are chronic autoimmune disorder, neuromuscular disorders such muscular dystrophies, inherited diseases all of which lead to chronic. Yet, I have always struggled to find resources for these diseases and individuals with these conditions struggle for proper pain management. There has been an increase in suicides in these groups of over 470%. There are between 50 million and 100 million people in chronic pain. At it’s peak before the white papers, the HFPP or the PDMP (Physician drug monitoring program), there were only about 2000 chronic pain doctors to manage these people. Prescribing of prescription opiates has declined lethal levels. Leaving people to resort to reaching for the streets to manage their pain. Chronic pain patients have no choice but to use dangerous drugs which cannot be monitored. Mainly synthetic fentanyl and heroin. This has lead to a massive 1040% increase in misuse, over doses up to 2020. From 2020 – 20221, this has grown another 28%, with over 100,000 over dose deaths. The most ever.

In summary, the government, including the Trump administration purposely compromised the health of the American public, shunned chronic care and allowed pain, suffering and early death for benefit for profit for the health insurance industry. This not only constitutes extremes in inhumane behavior, akin to the Third Reich, but extreme criminal behavior which unlike Germany from 1933 to 1945, affects all citizens without boundaries for class, race or socio-economic status.

Here is the information the government released to us:  Released Records (1).pdf

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If you have a Medicare Part D prgm… you need to check what your plan is going to charge you using this link http://www.medicare.gov/plan-compare/#/?lang=en&year=2022

In checking our Part D plan… the total annual cost ( premiums, deductibles, med costs) ranged from the lowest cost/yr to about TEN TIMES that cost.  For the same meds & quantities.

I guess this is what is possible when you are dealing with FOR PROFIT INSURANCE COMPANIES – the same thing may apply to those companies providing Medicare Advantage prgm or what they are starting to call Medicare-C

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CVS to close 900 drugstores in three years to beef up health services

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/cvs-health-close-stores-record-impairment-charge-2021-11-18/

Nov 18 (Reuters) – CVS Health Corp (CVS.N) will shut about 900 stores over the next three years, it said on Thursday as the company tries to adapt to changing consumer preferences by pivoting to new store formats that offer more health services.

Best known for its chain of drugstores in more than 9,900 locations, the company has been working to expand its services since it acquired health insurer Aetna in 2018.

CVS said that as part of its strategic review it would create an enhanced version of its health hubs that offer treatment for common ailments as well as chronic care to add more customers.

The reduction in stores will result in CVS taking an impairment charge of between $1 billion and $1.2 billion in the fourth quarter.

As part of the new strategy, the company also created a new position of chief pharmacy officer and appointed executive vice president of specialty pharmacy and product innovation Prem Shah to the role.

“We see this as consistent with our expected LT (long-term) strategy for CVS, moving to grow managed care and care delivery, while shrinking legacy bricks-and-mortar retail business,” said Bernstein analyst Lance Wilkes in a note.

Rival Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA.O) also recently shifted focus beyond its drugstores, investing $5.2 billion in VillageMD and $330 million in post-acute and home care provider CareCentrix. read more

CVS cut its annual 2021 profit per share forecast to between $5.46 and $5.67 from $6.13 to $6.23, but stuck to its adjusted profit view saying there will be no impact from the store closures this year and the next.

It also said Neela Montgomery, president of CVS Pharmacy, would leave company at the end of 2021.

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https://doctorsofcourage.org/richard-morgan-do/

Richard Morgan, DO, was a physical medicine and rehabilitation (PM & R) physician in New York City.  He was also an addict, which led him to commit the crime of selling prescriptions for drugs. Literally, he is the first doctor in the 5 years that I have been researching, to actually be guilty of violating the Controlled Substance Act. And yet, unlike all of us who are innocent victims unable to work again, he is a clinical instructor at a medical school with a future of having his license reinstated.  How could this be, and how does it make you feel? I can honestly say my feelings sway like a pendulum.

Richard Morgan’s history as a physician

Richard Morgan, DO graduated in 1998 from the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine alongside osteopath near croydon. He completed his residency in PM & R in 2002. But from 1997 through 2007, he was addicted to opioids and benzodiazepines. To this day, he blames being treated with opioids following dental surgery as a medical student as the cause of his addiction.  Hopefully this article will get through to him and others who blame opioids for addiction.

History of his addiction

In 1997 while a medical student, he had his wisdom teeth pulled, developed an abscess and received a prescription for Vicodin. Taking it as prescribed, he began to notice a change in how the medication affected him. “It was no longer about the pain,” he said. “I really started enjoying how it made me feel.” Suffering from stress in school and with his wife, “it just gave me this feeling of empowerment that I could take on the world.” He would get prescriptions for fake patients from the hospital pharmacy to use himself.

After graduation from residency in 2002, he wasn’t happy in the job he began. With his resentment and frustration, Morgan’s addiction worsened. “I realized I was starting to take pills to boost my confidence,” Morgan says. Some young kids approached him at the urgent care center and offered him money to prescribe them pills. At first he said no. Then one of them threw down thousands of dollars in cash and he changed his mind. He also wrote himself prescriptions using about 15 different fake names, with false addresses and dates of birth. He went to dozens of pharmacies to spread out his prescriptions and refills, and he paid cash.

In early 2006, Morgan’s family staged an intervention. After two failed rehab attempts he finally participated in New York State’s PHP (physician health program) and was able to stay clean afterward. But the people who bought prescriptions from him tracked him down, threatened him, and he continued to write prescriptions for them.

Dr. Morgan’s Conviction and Imprisonment

In May 2007, at age 35, Dr. Morgan was arrested for conspiracy to distribute oxycodone. According to the indictment, Dr. Morgan sold more than1,500 prescriptions for OxyContin and other drugs, for individuals who were not patients, including one recipient who paid him roughly $6,000 per month for more than a year.

Although early in the attacks on doctors, DEA Special Agent-in-Charge John Gilbride already had the propaganda line taught by the DEA and said, “Trafficking OxyContin is no different than trafficking cocaine, but in this case, the source of supply wore a white doctor’s coat.”

Following his defense attorney’s recommendations, Dr. Morgan pleaded guilty. Over the next 2 years, while awaiting sentencing, he continued to practice medicine, but without the ability to write prescriptions. Despite the frequent drug testing and therapy sessions, he still had a “pill fixation,” he says. “I felt comfort in pills.” He bought Sudafed and took whole sheets of the pills to get a little bit of a high. “It would almost feel like I drank 10 cups of coffee at the same time,” he says. So in spite of his saying he was “clean”, he was still abusing. During one month, Morgan bought more Sudafed than was allowed by state law. He was arrested again in March 2009.

Dr. Morgan was sentenced to 14 years in prison. But lucky for him, after serving 8 years, he was rewarded with an early release in April 2017.

Post-incarceration

It’s amazing to me how thousands of innocent physicians have had their lives ruined, tried to get their stories to the public, and can’t because the media have an agenda against us.  But Dr. Morgan, an addict and a law breaker, gets an appearance on The Dr. Oz Show to tell his story.

Then he gets an invitation to speak at the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine to students at the school about his experience with addiction. That was followed by becoming a full time clinical instructor at New York Institute of Technology of Osteopathic Medicine. With the help of New York State’s physician health program, he is working to regain his medical license.

Chances of relapse?

In the 4 years since his release from prison, Dr. Morgan says he has never come close to experiencing a relapse. But he knows it could happen. He hopes that constantly remembering what happened to him because of addiction will protect him from relapsing.

“So many positive things are happening,” Morgan says, “and they wouldn’t be happening if I ever picked up a pill.”

But addiction isn’t a case of mind over matter. Until he learns the REAL cause of addiction and does the 7 steps to healing, he is always at risk.

My thoughts on the good news/bad news of this case:

1. Morgan broke the law. But it was caused by his addiction, just like all of the inmates in prison cells for drugs. So he does deserve a second chance. The fact that he is getting it when the rest of us aren’t might not be fair. But when is life fair?
2. I hope Dr. Morgan will use his connections to bring justice to the rest of us. So my message to him is:

Dr. Morgan,
Learn the REAL cause of drug abuse. Use that when you teach to the residents, not that opioids or drugs cause addiction.  Become a member of Doctorsofcourage and help get our message out to the country through your connections.  Heal yourself with the Seven Steps to Healing and help promote the knowledge that you learn from us. It is in line with the philosophy of osteopathic medicine.

I wish you all the best, in healing and in your profession.

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DEAR ADVOCATE ARMY

Those with chronic painful conditions have a real reason to celebrate this holiday season! Last week two courts discredited widely accepted propaganda regarding opioid medications. One California and another Oklahoma Supreme Court judge illustrated how misleading this widely accepted and heavily promoted propaganda really is.

Both of these court decisions recognize that under-treatment of pain is a serious public health issue and that medicinal use of prescription opioids rarely led to addiction.

Oh but wait? Didn’t Andrew Kolodny and Anna Lembke (along with thousands of other advocates, politicians, and leading stakeholders), use this propaganda in order to promote their own agendas both nationally and internationally?

For years, special interest groups spent millions (if not billions) of dollars advancing propaganda. They would claim; organizations working to educate the public that opioid addiction was not a common outcome for patients who take it as prescribed were just “Pharma front groups” that needed to be “taken out” at all costs.

These special interest groups spent years marketing the idea that citizens should not receive opioid medications, as a mere exposure would lead to addiction and substance use disorder. They created slideshow presentations that they would use to discredit existing research; using statements not founded in the truth. These statements, in-fact, went directly against the evidence-base.

They successfully lobbied for hundreds of regulatory and legal changes restricting medical access to pain medications. They provided false testimony. Most recently, Ms. Lembke testified that over 25% of patients who use opioids medicinally become addicted; however, the judge corrected her and stated, “it was more like less than 5%.”

So why was her testimony not discredited entirely? Why was she not charged with perjury? These cases are worth billions of dollars and Ms. Lembke provided known false facts in an attempt to sway the outcome of the case. We cannot overlook these serious acts of corruption.

In fact, Dr. Nora Volkow, Director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, noted in a 2016 review that, “addiction occurs in only a small percentage of persons who are exposed to opioids – even among those with preexisting vulnerabilities”.

So, the stakeholders have known since at least 2016 that patients who use opioid medications were not abusing their supply. Yet, the CDC proceeded with the issuance of their “Opioid Prescribing Guidelines” that same year; resulting in the mass-forced tapering of millions of private citizens. Many of whom have committed suicide since.

Now that this dangerous propaganda is verified to be just that (dangerous propaganda), what will happen next? Will our lawmakers do the right thing? Will they change course in their public-health strategy to address illicit drug use and addiction in America?

It is time our nation came to terms with the facts. We have pursued a failed public-health initiative for well over a decade. This is largely due to our nations’ leaders relying on inaccurate false data and propaganda. Propaganda that was created, marketed, and promoted by the very organizations that partnered with our lawmakers to assist in solving these very issues.

Moving forward, we as a nation must come together and create solutions that work for all patients. The continual use of propaganda is unacceptable and not working. This court ruling brings hope for the future that the truth is now coming forth. It is in the truth that we, as a nation, will find solutions that benefit all.

Remember, Together We Are #CIAAGStrong!!!

Thank you,

Lauren L. Deluca, CPCU, API, AINS

Founding President & Executive Director

Chronic Illness Advocacy & Awareness Group dba CIAAG

This e-mail has been sent to @, click here to unsubscribe.

PO Box 371, Rutland MA 01543 – USA

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I don’t normally go out on the “political limb”, but  long story short – we had video security cameras installed on the house and the “software installer” was here Wed to finish up that part of the installation… right after he left… my hold internet network CRASHED…  Only way to get it back up was to reset my router… so I have spent most of post turkey meal resetting all the 13 odd internet devices in my house.. – including 3 TV’s. In trying one of the TV’s.. I made sure that I could stream and just pulled up FOX NATION and pulled up a three part Patriot Purge series…

This proved a very interesting series…  very little “talk” by the normal Fox “talking heads”… A fair amount of videos of others within our government and citizens in our country … interacting with our legal system… How it would appear that our military/legal system has no current wars to fight… they are using some of the tactics developed after 911 on many of our citizens that has been labeled as TERRORISTS

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Yoho MD, Robert. Butchered by “Healthcare”: What to Do About Doctors, Big Pharma, and Corrupt Government Ruining Your Health and Medical Care (pp. 55-57). Inverness Press. Kindle Edition. The FDA permits data scams. Researchers from the Yale University School of Medicine looked at trials between 2005 and 2012. They found that the FDA based many drug approvals on studies that used various forms of data cheating. Donald Light and Ben Goldacre separately confirmed this story. They wrote: ✪ Thirty-seven percent of the drugs had only a single study. ✪ Forty-five percent of the trials for drug approval used study endpoints such as blood sugar or cholesterol (surrogate markers) rather than hard endpoints such as death or another clinical finding. ✪ Nearly a third 0f all the studies made a comparison with an older drug. When two drugs are found to be about the same, the companies usually claim some obscure advantage for the recent one. This games the approval process and allows the industry to market expensive “me-too” medications that offer no benefit over the older ones. ✪ To make a drug look good, the companies often exclude people who are more likely to have adverse outcomes. Other times, they use people who are more likely to have problems, which can make an older drug look bad. ✪ When companies do nonrandomized trials on unrepresentative populations, they can create almost any result. ✪ Experiments are sometimes run that lack a comparator or control arm. This is called a single-arm trial and has little validity. ✪ Some experimenters do approval studies that are not randomized, controlled, and double blinded, which is the current standard of proof. Some allow studies that are easily unblinded. ✪ To show benefit, sometimes doses of a test drug are used that are too high for routine clinical use. These studies last long enough to show benefits but are kept short enough to conceal adverse reactions. ✪ The other way this is played is to use high doses of the comparison drug. This creates side effects that make the new drug look great by comparison. ✪ Another often-used ploy is inaccurate measurement and improper reporting of the number needed to treat and number needed to harm. ✪ Huge trials are sometimes stopped early because results appear beneficial or harmful at that point. This prevents full evaluation and complete reporting. Physicians should be trained to detect these commonplace forms of deceit when reading medical journals. I spotted them as I learned more. In a 2012 BMJ editorial analysis, Donald Light and Joel Lexchin wrote that, of all the new products developed in the past 50 years, 85-90 percent produced many harms but few benefits. Most of them are me-too drugs used for established markets. They are not improvements. These medications are 80 percent of the US increase in drug spending.

Yoho MD, Robert. Butchered by “Healthcare”: What to Do About Doctors, Big Pharma, and Corrupt Government Ruining Your Health and Medical Care (pp. 55-57). Inverness Press. Kindle Edition.

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