https://www.toddstarnes.com/business/breaking-chick-fil-a-sauce-shortage/

First it was fried chicken. Now Chick-fil-A has announced a sauce shortage.

“I just want to point out that Chick-fil-A sauce was bountiful during the Trump presidency,” national radio host Todd Starnes said. “Now our great nation is facing the most catastrophic of calamities.”

Chick-fil-A is limiting the number of dipping sauces each customer receives at restaurant locations due to an industry-wide shortage, WKRN reports.

In an email to customers, the popular chicken chain explained the new rules: One sauce packet for an entree. Two sauces per meal. And three sauces for 30-count nuggets.

“We are actively working to make adjustments to solve this issue quickly and apologize to our guests for any inconvenience,” the company said in a statement on its website.

Many on social media expressed concern and, in some cases, panic.

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Doesn’t amaze everyone that in this particular “take down” the DEA is picking on a 78 y/o prescriber… if he has had a successful career … one can just imagine the net worth of this particular individual and given any “jail time ” at his age … could be a LIFE SENTENCE !  They give a time tablet of May 2016  to “last Oct”… since the article was published in May 2021… can it be presumed that it was Oct 2020 ?  so the time frame seem to be 52 months, yet the indictment is for 242 counts – each count is a prescription written.  So with 5 pts one could estimate that there would be 260 Rxs.. And in many cases the FIVE PTS received NEARLY 100 Opioid doses… implied “monthly”.  What is “nearly 100 doses “? There is a LARGE DIFFERENCE between 100 doses of Oxycodone 5mg and 100 doses of Oxycodone 80 mg ER. Something like A SIXTEEN FOLD DIFFERENCE.

Did the DEA come to the conclusion that these “steroid injections” … “were neither reasonable nor medically necessary – is this because both the FDA and Upjohn the pharma that produced a particular steroid that is used in Epidural Spinal Injection (ESI) does not recommend this medication be used in ESI application. but this article only stated that the pts were given steroid injections – could have also been a MI injection…

According to this, Dr Lee’s practice provided —  Anesthesiology Other Specialty Pain Management Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation

https://doctor.webmd.com/doctor/john-lee-739f6de0-601a-45e9-805f-d8d09b224e3c-overview

Does this all mean that all “pain clinics” could end up being a target of the DEA … if they win their case against Dr Lee ?  It is reported that there are abt 10 million ESI injections each year at $1000 – $3000 each.  This means that this market is worth 10 – 30 billion a year.

How many pts did Dr. Lee have and/or how many pts did he treat each month ?  So many unknowns and/or facts that the DEA is not sharing – at this time.

Peters doctor faces federal charges for opioid prescriptions, steroid injections

https://observer-reporter.com/news/localnews/peters-doctor-faces-federal-charges-for-opioid-prescriptions-steroid-injections/article_620d9f58-af56-11eb-9a97-0f57100f62a1.html

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An Experimental Vaccine Cannot be Mandated: Know Your Rights

https://home.frankspeech.com/article/experimental-vaccine-cannot-be-mandated-know-your-rights

Democrat Governors in many states have gone to great links to politicize the China virus by issuing mandates that have repeatedly violated American constitutional rights. Some of these same liberal politicians are now in discussions about mandating mask wearing and vaccinations. However, the law makes it clear that an experimental vaccine cannot be mandated!

According to an article published by The Christian News Wire “On March 27, 2020, the Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary declared that circumstances exist justifying the authorization of emergency use (EUA) of drugs and biological products for COVID-19. That means people must be told the risks and benefits, and they have the right to decline a medication that is not fully licensed. The same section of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act that authorizes the FDA to grant EUA also requires the secretary of Health and Human Services to “ensure that individuals to whom the product is administered are informed … of the option to accept or refuse administration of the product.”

Thus, it’s very important to stay armed with all the resources needed to advocate for yourself and your loved ones. For more details of how to protect yourself from an infringement upon your constitutional rights, visit America’s Frontline Doctors Legal Eagle Dream Team’s website to learn more about Masks, Vaccines and the Law.

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CVS, Walgreens responsible for 70% of wasted COVID-19 vaccines

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/pharmacy/cvs-walgreens-responsible-for-70-of-wasted-covid-19-vaccines.html

CVS and Walgreens were responsible for 128,500 of the 182,874 wasted COVID-19 vaccine doses recorded by the CDC as of late March, Kaiser Health News reported May 3.

Of those 182,874 wasted doses, CVS was responsible for nearly half, and Walgreens for 21 percent. The two retail pharmacy giants wasted more doses than states, U.S. territories and federal agencies combined, according to CDC data.

The bulk of the wasted doses came from the companies’ long-term care facility vaccination programs, which were launched at the beginning of the country’s mass inoculation efforts.

CVS told Kaiser Health News “nearly all” of its reported vaccine waste occurred during its long-term care facility vaccination efforts. Michael DeAngelis, CVS’ senior director of corporate communications, attributed the wasted doses to “issues with transportation restrictions, limitations on redirecting unused doses, and other factors.”

Mr. DeAngelis also told Kaiser Health News that CVS limited its waste to approximately one dose per onsite vaccination clinic.

Walgreens told Kaiser Health News its wasted doses accounted for less than 0.5 percent of the 8.2 million vaccine doses it administered through March 29.

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I have suspected for years that the gross under treating of pain by our medical system has allowed nerve paths to be altered that any stimuli that it receives … it interprets it as PAIN… and it is nearly IMPOSSIBLE for the nerve path will revert to a normal status after several months of untreated pain… and it has created a new CHRONIC PAIN PT ! Does this report suggest that I may have been right all along ?

Managing Risk of Chronic Post-Surgical Pain: Timing Is Key

https://www.medpagetoday.com/meetingcoverage/aapm/92314

Psychological interventions can help reduce risk of persistent pain after surgery but timing is critical, a pain expert said at the virtual 2021 American Academy of Pain Medicine annual meeting.

“We can look at chronic pain as occurring in a very linear process,” said Ravi Prasad, PhD, of University of California Davis, in a meeting session about multimodal ways to prevent chronic post-surgical pain.

“By definition, pain starts off as something acute,” Prasad noted. The acute phase includes assessments and treatment to try to eliminate pain quickly.

“When the pain condition fails to respond to some of these initial treatments, it starts to enter the subacute category,” Prasad said. “The patient is still engaged in different medical workups to try to identify the cause of the pain and still participating in treatments, but they haven’t responded to the interventions in the manner expected, meaning the pain continues to persist.” This is usually about 3 to 6 months after the acute phase.

When a patient’s pain reports have plateaued and pain is refractory to medical treatments for at least 6 months, it can become chronic.

“It’s important to recognize these time points exist,” Prasad emphasized. “We can intervene at these different points — and intervene even prior to the experience of acute pain — to try to minimize the likelihood that persistent pain develops.”

Factors that contribute to chronic pain include environmental stressors, lifestyle factors, unhealthy support systems, limited access to care, and patient risk factors including history of substance abuse, adverse childhood experiences, and psychiatric conditions.

Research has shown the most useful predictors of poor pain outcomes after surgery were pre-surgical somatization, depression, anxiety, and poor coping.

“All of these are things that are actually modifiable,” Prasad said. “We can actually do something about these to change the outcomes a person might have.”

Cognitive therapies and relaxation training are two interventions receiving a lot of attention, he noted. Breathing, relaxation exercises, and meditative practices can help patients learn to quiet the nervous system by working on the sympathetic-parasympathetic axis. But cognitive processes also have to be targeted, Prasad observed, and “this is where cognitive behavioral therapy can come in.”

The crux of cognitive behavioral theory is that “by changing the interpretation, we can change the impact of consequences at the emotional, physical, and behavioral level,” Prasad said. “The challenge with this is that our interpretations tend to be automatic.”

“Making changes in our interpretation is difficult because we have to become aware of processes that are occurring in our subconscious and make changes in something that’s been with us for a very long period of time,” he acknowledged. “These thought processes can be very resistant to change. But it’s essential we do this if we want to have sustained change in our outcomes.”

It’s not something as simple as turning negative thoughts into positive ones, Prasad added. “Rather, we look at the accuracy and the degree of helpfulness of the thoughts, and modify the thoughts into something that is more accurate and helpful.”

“We know that when people engage in cognitive behavioral therapy, their outcomes are improved. Affective stress is decreased, pain sensitivity decreases, and this can minimize opioid burden,” he continued. And it’s not the only intervention that can help: “there’s a wide range of psychological-based tools that have a strong evidence base behind them,” including biofeedback training and mindfulness-based stress reduction.

But timing of these treatments is essential, Prasad emphasized.

“The way to optimize timing is to do presurgical screening to identify what’s the most appropriate intervention for the patient,” he said. Some patients may need help before surgery, others can be targeted at the acute or subacute phase. “Regardless, we want to make sure we address symptoms as early as possible and not wait for pain to be in a chronic state.”

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I have been a “student of the bureaucracies” for some 40 + yrs …. and this whole CDC opiate dosing guidelines issue is from the same “play book” that I have seen bureaucrats use over and over again for all those years, but this time… the CDC did the whole process behind closed doors, trying to keeping those participating anonymously – which failed… The primary charge of the CDC is to deal with communicable diseases and the last time I checked… pain is not a communicable disease.  Did anyone challenge the constitutionality of these guidelines created by the CDC without statutory authority ?  Apparently not, because people of the bureaucratic chain… wanted these guidelines published. While it is often stated that we are “country of laws”, but what is not often stated is that all too many of our laws are never/seldom enforced.  Score so far SWAMP  ONE & PEOPLE ZERO.

Opioid Policy Concerns? Here’s How the CDC ‘Responds’ To Letters

https://www.acsh.org/news/2021/04/30/opioid-policy-concerns-heres-how-cdc-responds-letters-15519

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Kaul sues State of New Jersey in India

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NP Thyroid by Acella has once again been recalled!

https://stopthethyroidmadness.com/2021/04/30/np-thyroid-by-acella-has-once-again-been-recalled

Yup. It’s happened again. The following lots of NP Thyroid by Acella Pharmaceuticals LLC have been recalled due to sub-potency! 15-mg, 30-mg, 60-mg, 90-mg and 120-mg NP Thyroid^®

And as the creator of Stop the Thyroid Madness (STTM) patient-to-patient movement, I’m not surprised.

Since Acella brought NP Thyroid back after the recall(s) in 2019, there have STILL been complaints by some hypothyoid or Hashimoto’s patients!! No, not all. But enough to cause concern. The complaints have occurred in thyroid groups directly associated with STTM…and even in groups that are not directly associated with STTM. I was hearing those complaints in STTM coaching calls. I was hearing about them from many patient volunteers who contact me!

What were the continued complaints? They revolved around not being able to fully get out of one’s hypothyroid state.

And this is the second time for a recall of NP Thyroid

The first recall(s) happened in 2019. And you can read my blog post about it here. You will read that in some patients, their newly obtained NP Thyroid prescription was causing problems in the Summer of 2019. Then by Fall of 2019, there were obvious changes along with a return of hypothyroid symptoms, like a “cat piss” or “ammonia-type: smell. Patients reported back then:

1. It now smells and tastes horrible, worse than before.
2. The tablets look different from previous ones
3. I’m feeling much worse now on the same dose that made me feel great. Symptoms are back.

Then in the same blog post, you will read about the recall due to sub-potency, then later “super potency”. Either way, it was clear that too many patients were NOT feeling well on it anymore. Even those who said they still did feel well, didn’t have labs to prove it would last.

So what do you do now if you had returned to using NP Thyroid since it came back out again?

Still to this day for what appears to be the majority of hypothyroid patients, Armour desiccated thyroid is working (even though there have been periods in the past where it had problems, but they seem to have been corrected a few years ago). So is using synthetic T4 with synthetic T3. Examples of the two synthetics are Tirosint for T3 with Cytomel or Sigma Pharm for T3. Honestly, all the brands have worked.

BUT….we as patient learned that to make either work correctly, we have to have the following:

1) The right amount of cortisol, otherwise we get hyper-like symptoms when raising. You can read this page to see clues that you might not have the right amount of cortisol. i.e. some levels being too low, others too high. All can cause hyperlike symptoms when raising a product with T3 in it. It’s the results of pooling.
2) The right amount of iron levels, otherwise we get rising RT3 (reverse T3), an inactive hormone which can block us from achieving the right amount of T3.
3) Optimal free T4 and optimal free T3. Optimal is NOT midrange. Optimal is not below midrange. Optimal is not just slightly above midrange

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Should Dying Cancer Patients Suffer From Under treated Pain Because of ‘Concerns Regarding Addiction’?

https://reason.com/2021/04/27/should-dying-cancer-patients-suffer-from-undertreated-pain-because-of-concerns-regarding-addiction/

Two recent studies show how ham-handed efforts to reduce opioid prescriptions undermine medical care.

Two recent studies show how the attempt to curtail drug abuse by discouraging and restricting opioid prescriptions has hurt bona fide patients by depriving them of the medication they need to ease their pain. The harm inflicted on these innocent bystanders, which would not be morally justified even if the opioid crackdown did what it was supposed to do, is all the more appalling because limiting legal access to these drugs seems to have accelerated the upward trend in opioid-related deaths by driving nonmedical users toward black-market substitutes.

Jon Furuno, an associate professor of pharmacy practice at the Oregon State University College of Pharmacy, looked at prescribing patterns among 2,648 terminal patients who were transferred from an academic medical center to hospice care from January 2010 through December 2018. During that period, regulators and legislators responded to the “opioid crisis” by directly and indirectly limiting analgesic prescriptions, often in ham-handed ways. While that was happening, the study found, the share of hospice-bound patients who had opioid prescriptions when they were discharged fell from 91.2 percent to 79.3 percent—a 13 percent drop.

Furuno and his co-authors, who reported their results this month in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, controlled for age, sex, diagnosis, and the location of hospice care, so changes in those factors do not account for the decline in opioid prescriptions. Furthermore, “prescribing of non-opioid analgesic  medications increased over the same time period,” meaning that pain was more likely to be treated with less effective but still potentially dangerous drugs.

The average age of these patients was 66. Nearly three-fifths had cancer diagnoses, and all of them were expected to die soon, meaning that treatment should have been focused on making them as comfortable as possible in their remaining time.

“Even among patients prescribed opioids during the last 24 hours of their inpatient hospital stay, opioid prescribing upon discharge decreased,” Furuno noted in a press release. “It seems unlikely that patients would merit an opioid prescription on their last day in the hospital but not on their first day in hospice care, and it’s well documented that interruptions in the continuity of pain treatment on transition to hospice are associated with poor patient outcomes.”

Furuno noted that “pain is a common end-of-life symptom, and it’s often debilitating.” He added that more than 60 percent of terminal cancer patients report “very distressing pain.”

In this context, it is especially striking that Furuno and his colleagues cite “patient and caregiver concerns regarding addiction” as one obstacle to adequate pain treatment. The risk of addiction is exaggerated and overemphasized even when physicians are treating chronic pain in patients who may have years or decades to live. When patients on the verge of death are suffering severe pain that could be relieved by opioids, “concerns regarding addiction” seem like a cruel joke.

Furuno et al. also mention “policies and practices aimed at limiting opioid use in response to the opioid epidemic,” which are based on similar fears and reinforce them. In particular, Furuno cites the opioid prescribing guidelines that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued in 2016.

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