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chronic pain NEVER KILLED ANYONE – it is their SUICIDE that puts a end to their pain ?
Posted on February 14, 2019 by Pharmaciststeve
Pharmacy manager one of two shot at Walgreens after dispute, suspect identified
Posted on February 14, 2019 by Pharmaciststeve
Garner, N.C. — A pharmacy manager was one of two people shot Thursday morning after an altercation at a Garner drugstore, according to the victim’s friends.
Sarah Wright, 31, of Clayton, was listed in stable condition at WakeMed on Thursday afternoon. According to the Walgreens website, she is a pharmacy manager and has worked for the company for 11 years.
Brandon Gordon, 33, of Clayton, was also shot. He was taken to WakeMed, where he was listed in critical condition.
Friends that spoke to WRAL’s Amanda Lamb described Wright as “very sweet and very loving.” They said said Wright “deals with tough situations with humor. She doesn’t take any punches.
Friends said that Wright has been talkative and has been able to interact with family, medical staff and investigators. She is married to a Johnston County attorney.
Authorities identified 60-year-old Stephen Denning as the shooting suspect. Authorities said Denning was listed in stable condition at WakeMed.
Authorities have not released a motive and it was not clear whether Denning knew the victims.
Denning lives withing walking distance of the Walgreens. One neighbor said it would be hard to believe that Denning committed the crimes.
“They might even have the wrong guy because it just doesn’t sound like him, nothing. It is that out of character,” Corey Darden said.
Raleigh police and Wake County sheriff’s deputies responded to the Walgreens, located at 1116 U.S. Highway 70, where the shooting took place just before 10 a.m.
A 911 call made by one of the victims details how the shooting unfolded.
“I’ve been shot at Walgreens,” the caller said. “A customer shot me in the pharmacy…an angry customer shot me…I know the customer.”
Minutes later, authorities were called to a nearby Golden Corral, located at 3551 Grenelle St. in Raleigh, where Denning was arrested.
Garner police Capt. Joe Binns said a Wake County sheriff’s deputy stopped him from entering the restaurant.
Victor Sosa said he was outside a nearby car dealership when he saw police try to stop a speeding blue Hyundai.
Denning abandoned the vehicle and then ran toward the Golden Corral.
“I heard the officers say, ‘Stop what you’re doing, get on the floor, put your hands behind your back,’ Sosa said. “He didn’t cooperate, and next thing you know we hear a couple of bullets fired.”
He was with coworkers at the time, he said, and no one knew what to do.
“The bullets, just hearing that woke us up,” he said. “Once we heard that, I just told my coworkers, ‘You know what, stand back. If the officer had to do that, it’s for a reason. We don’t know what’s going on, what he has, or what could potentially lead out to another shootout.'”
An official said a Wake County sheriff’s deputy shot Denning. The State Bureau of Investigation is expected to look into the incident, a routine response when a North Carolina law enforcement officer is involved in a shooting.
The official said it is too early to know if that deputy will be placed on administrative leave.
Based on live video from Sky 5, one person was carried out of the restaurant on a medical stretcher, but it was not clear if that was Denning.
In a statement, Walgreens Co. said, “Our first concern is the safety of our team members and customers who were in the store at the time as well as our team members who were injured.
“We are assessing the situation and are thankful to the first responders,” it continued.
The Golden Corral franchise also issued a statement Thursday afternoon:
“Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and all of those who were affected by this unfortunate incident. We are grateful for the quick response of the authorities. The restaurant was closed when the suspect was apprehended and no guests were in danger. We have made counselors available for our co-workers who were in the restaurant. The safety of our guests and co-workers is always our first priority. For any other information, we refer you to law enforcement,” the statement said.
Last week it was a Pharmacist being BEATEN during a pharmacy robbery
Pharmacist battered during armed robbery at Carmel Walgreens
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BCSO warns of scammers impersonating DEA agents
Posted on February 14, 2019 by Pharmaciststeve
The Blount County Sheriff’s Office is warning citizens about a new scam in which people are impersonating Drug Enforcement Administration agents and threatening widespread consequences unless they send gift card codes.
According to BCSO, a 64-year-old woman reported that she was conned out of $7,000 by a man who claimed to be a DEA agent named Mike Allen, calling from the number 240-288-5221.
The woman said the would-be agent told her a large amount of drugs had been found in a car she rented that was discovered in El Paso, Texas. He claimed the finding would affect her Social Security and said she would need to purchase a number of gift cards and send him the card’s numbers to avoid criminal charges, according to the woman.
BCSO is reminding citizens that law enforcement officers will not ask for money over the phone and that it is a federal offense to impersonate a federal agent.
Citizens are advised not to give up any personal information when they receive calls like this and to hang up immediately. Scams involving the DEA can be reported on the agency’s website.
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DEA: going to solve mental health/substance abuse with educational digital billboard
Posted on February 14, 2019 by Pharmaciststeve
DEA Launches Digital Billboard Campaign Against Opioid Use
https://news.wttw.com/2019/02/14/dea-launches-digital-billboard-campaign-against-opioid-use
As part of its ongoing efforts to combat the opioid epidemic, the Drug Enforcement Agency announced Thursday it’s launching a yearlong digital billboard campaign across the Chicago area.
Messages in both English and Spanish will be displayed on area roadways, train stations and other locations, warning passersby of the dangers of opioids, including legally prescribed medications, and outlining treatment options.
“The purpose of this campaign is to stir up action in our communities and to save lives,” said Robert J. Bell, U.S. DEA associate special agent in charge of the Chicago field division office. The 12-month campaign is a partnership between the DEA, Chicago Crime Commission and Clear Channel Outdoor.
“I hope that (the billboards) put a little fear into a parent’s heart and they go home and they’re motivated to talk with their kids … about the dangers of drug addiction of any myriad of drugs,” he said.
Educating the public about the dangers of opioids and treatment options is “critical” to defeating the epidemic, according to Douglas O’Brien, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Region 5 director.
“This (epidemic) will not be defeated in Washington,” said O’Brien. “It’s going to be defeated in communities around the country, in emergency rooms, in church basements, in police stations and in people’s living rooms.”
O’Brien hopes the digital billboard campaign can serve as a catalyst to spark conversations and to connect people who have substance use disorders with treatment.
“I’m hopeful this campaign and the messages it sends can speak to all the community members out there who may not know how to start those conversations with their loved ones,” said Amy Voss of Buffalo Grove, who lost her son Jared to a heroin and cocaine overdose in 2015. “Please start those conversations.”
The DEA has also created educational resources, including a tool kit for parents with information on warning signs of opioid misuse and a guide to prevention, on the Operation Prevention website.
Contact Kristen Thometz: @kristenthometz | kthometz@wttw.com | (773) 509-5452
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South Elgin man sues Meijer after getting wrong form of medication
Posted on February 14, 2019 by Pharmaciststeve
Jim Danz was being wheeled out of his South Elgin home by paramedics on a stretcher, in the throes of what he thought was his second heart attack in barely a week.
“It was horrifying,” Danz said. “I can still picture my daughter watching me being taken away. I thought I was going to die and never see any of my kids again.”
The 41-year-old father of five believes the second heart-related emergency only happened because a pharmacist at a Meijer store in Elgin gave him the wrong form of a medication for his first heart attack. He’s suing the retail giant and the pharmacist for $700,000 to cover his medical bills, lost time at work and pain and suffering Danz said lingers to this day. The suit was filed Thursday in Kane County.
Meijer officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the suit.
According to the lawsuit, Danz suffered a heart attack Feb. 16, 2017. He was out driving for his sales job when he started feeling ill. He called his wife to see if he could get a doctor’s appointment, but Danz said the symptoms intensified while he was near DeKalb, so he called 911 and they directed him to Northwestern Medicine Kishwaukee Hospital, where emergency room doctors determined he was suffering a “myocardial infarction,” the lawsuit states. He was hospitalized for two days before being released and given a prescription for metoprolol succinate, a beta blocker used to treat heart failure. It’s a slow-releasing medication taken once a day and was prescribed to Danz at 25 milligrams, according to the lawsuit.
The prescription was filled at the Elgin Meijer store, but Danz was given a bottle of metoprolol tartrate, a fast-acting beta blocker used to guard against future heart attacks, according to the lawsuit. It’s usually prescribed in 50 milligram doses to be taken twice a day, Danz’s attorney Patrick Walsh said.
But Danz was given 25-milligram tablets, as the prescription read.
“At best he was getting a quarter of the medication he needed,” Walsh said.
Danz said he would take his medication in the morning and start to feel better, but by the evening he would begin to feel the symptoms similar to the heart attack. Eight days after being released from the hospital, Danz found himself on that stretcher en route to Presence St. Joseph Hospital in Elgin, where he was diagnosed with sinus tachycardia after his pulse rate rose to 180 beats per minutes, the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit states that days later, when Danz was picking up a new prescription, another Meijer pharmacist acknowledged the original error and told Danz about the mistake. There’s a notation on one of the prescriptions that it was erroneously filled, according to the suit.
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Team makes breakthrough toward developing blood test for pain
Posted on February 13, 2019 by Pharmaciststeve
Team makes breakthrough toward developing blood test for pain
https://m.medicalxpress.com/news/2019-02-team-breakthrough-blood-pain.html
A breakthrough test developed by Indiana University School of Medicine researchers to measure pain in patients could help stem the tide of the opioid crisis in Indiana, and throughout the rest of the nation.
A study led by psychiatry professor Alexander Niculescu, MD, Ph.D. and published this week in the high impact Nature journal Molecular Psychiatry tracked hundreds of participants at the Richard L. Roudebush VA Medical Center in Indianapolis to identify biomarkers in the blood that can help objectively determine how severe a patient’s pain is. The blood test, the first of its kind, would allow physicians far more accuracy in treating pain—as well as a better long-term look at the patient’s medical future.
“We have developed a prototype for a blood test that can objectively tell doctors if the patient is in pain, and how severe that pain is. It’s very important to have an objective measure of pain, as pain is a subjective sensation. Until now we have had to rely on patients self-reporting or the clinical impression the doctor has,” said Niculescu, who worked with other Department of Psychiatry researchers on the study. “When we started this work it was a farfetched idea. But the idea was to find a way to treat and prescribe things more appropriately to people who are in pain.”
During the study, researchers looked at biomarkers found in the blood—in this case molecules that reflect disease severity. Much like as glucose serves as a biomarker to diabetes, these biomarkers allow doctors to assess the severity of the pain the patient is experiencing, and provide treatment in an objective, quantifiable manner. With an opioid epidemic raging throughout the state and beyond, Niculescu said never has there been a more important time to administer drugs to patients responsibly.
“The opioid epidemic occurred because addictive medications were overprescribed due to the fact that there was no objective measure whether someone was in pain, or how severe their pain was,” Niculescu said. “Before, doctors weren’t being taught good alternatives. The thought was that this person says they are in pain, let’s prescribe it. Now people are seeing that this created a huge problem. We need alternatives to opioids, and we need to treat people in a precise fashion. This test we’ve developed allows for that.”
In addition to providing an objective measure of pain, Niculescu’s blood test helps physicians match the biomarkers in the patient’s blood with potential treatment options. Like a scene out of CSI, researchers utilize a prescription database—similar to fingerprint databases employed by the FBI—to match the pain biomarkers with profiles of drugs and natural compounds cataloged in the database.
“The biomarker is like a fingerprint, and we match it against this database and see which compound would normalize the signature,” said Niculescu, adding that often the best treatment identified is a non-opioid drug or compound. “We found some compounds that have been used for decades to treat other things pair the best with the biomarkers. We have been able to match biomarkers with existing medications, or natural compounds, which would reduce or eliminate the need to use the opioids.”
In keeping with the IU Grand Challenge Precision Health Initiative launched in June 2016, this study opens the door to precision medicine for pain. By treating and prescribing medicine more appropriately to the individual person, this prototype may help alleviate the dilemmas that have contributed to the current opioid epidemic.
“In any field, the goal is to match the patient to the right drug, which hopefully does a lot of good and very little harm,” Niculescu said. “But through precision health, by having lots of options geared toward the needs of specific patients, you prevent larger problems, like the opioid epidemic, from occurring.”
Additionally, study experts discovered biomarkers that not only match with non-addictive drugs that can treat pain, but can also help predict when someone might experience pain in the future—helping to determine if a patient is exhibiting chronic, long-term pain which might result in future emergency room visits.
“Through precision medicine you’re giving the patient treatment that is tailored directly to them and their needs,” Niculescu said. “We wanted first to find some markers for pain that are universal, and we were able to. We know, however, based on our data that there are some markers that work better for men, some that work better for women. It could be that there are some markers that work better for headaches, some markers that work better for fibromyalgia and so on. That is where we hope to go with future larger studies.”
The study was supported by an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award and a VA Merit Award. Moving forward, Niculescu’s group looks to secure more funding through grants or outside philanthropy to continue and accelerate these studies—with the hopes of personalizing the approach even more and moving toward a clinical application. A self-described longshot at the start, Niculescu said that the work his group has done could have a major impact on how doctors around the world treat pain in the future.
“It’s been a goal of many researchers and a dream to find biomarkers for pain,” Niculescu said. “We have come out of left field with an approach that had worked well in psychiatry for suicide and depression in previous studies. We applied it to pain, and we were successful. I give a lot of credit for that to my team at IU School of Medicine and the Indianapolis VA, as well as the excellent environment and support we have.”
More information: A. B. Niculescu et al, Towards precision medicine for pain: diagnostic biomarkers and repurposed drugs, Molecular Psychiatry (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41380-018-0345-5
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American Holocaust… war on pain pts ?
Posted on February 13, 2019 by Pharmaciststeve
https://youtu.be/VrTbpHJucYM
Why does America feel as if we are trapped in a time warp to Nazi-held Germany 1939? An American Holocaust and no one cares until it hits them in the face or happens to a loved one. TWELVE HEROES in TWELVE STATES are fighting for your freedoms & Constitutional Rights with #Starburst lawsuit filed in Federal Court. This video explains the horrors facing America today, our children and future generations. This is not the America I enlisted in the Marines to defend. 
Will you spare a few minutes to watch & comment? – 
Robert — Teufelshunde
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How PBM’s make “money from nothing” via audits
Posted on February 13, 2019 by Pharmaciststeve
Right mouse click on pic and click on “view image” to get enlarged graphic
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Tell Congress: Americans have a right to timely access to treatment!
Posted on February 13, 2019 by Pharmaciststeve
Tell Congress: Americans have a right to timely access to treatment!
https://fixpriorauth.org/take-action
Have you ever gone to the pharmacy to fill a prescription only to be told that your insurance company requires approval before they’ll cover your treatment? Have you ever waited for days, weeks, or months for a test or medical procedure to be scheduled because your physician first needed to obtain authorization from your insurer?
This policy is called “prior authorization,” and it’s a tactic used by insurance companies to control costs by requiring physicians to obtain approval before a treatment qualifies for coverage. This burdensome process is confusing, time consuming, and — most importantly — can cause delays in patients receiving the care they need.
Physicians are forced to spend valuable hours processing prior authorizations when they could be treating patients. Prior authorizations also impose unnecessary care delays on patients, interfering with treatment and even adversely impacting clinical outcomes.
A recent survey by the American Medical Association showed that Americans are abandoning treatment in alarming numbers due to delays caused by cumbersome prior authorization requirements.
It’s time for Congress to demand that insurance companies work with physicians, not against them, in order to improve and streamline the prior authorization process so that patients are ensured timely access to the care they need.
Add your name to tell Congress that you believe Americans have a right to timely access to medical treatment!
Americans across the country are experiencing significant delays in their access to care due to time-consuming and often unnecessary prior authorization requirements from their health insurance companies. Patients who have spent hard-earned dollars on insurance premiums suddenly find themselves unable to receive necessary medical treatment due to these onerous insurer policies.
The process of prior authorization as it currently stands is overused and inefficient. I urge you to work towards a solution to this problem that will reduce the burdens on both patients and physicians. The Prior Authorization and Utilization Management Reform Principles created by a coalition representing physicians, medical groups, pharmacists, hospitals, and patients outlines key changes needed to protect patients’ access to timely care and reduce administrative hassles for health care professionals. We urge you to review the Principles and include these important concepts in prior authorization reform legislation. Americans have a right to timely access to treatment!
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Not following an insurance company mandate which, in insurance auditor’s opinion, amounted to unprofessional conduct.
Posted on February 13, 2019 by Pharmaciststeve
How an insurance company auditor tried to destroy a physician’s career
shots. As a pediatrician in private practice for almost two decades, I’ve seen insurance companies transform into perhaps the single most powerful player in today’s health care landscape — final arbiters whose decisions about which procedures or medications to authorize effectively end up determining the course of patient care.
Decisions made by insurers, such as MassHealth, have arguably killed patients. But it was only when I got caught in the crosshairs of an insurance company auditor with a bone to pick that I fully appreciated their power to also destroy physicians’ careers.
My nightmare began around two years ago, when my late father, also a physician with whom I was in practice, and I opened our Silverdale clinic on a Saturday. It was the start of flu season, and we’d just received 100 doses of that year’s flu shot. Anxiety about the flu was running high following the death of a local girl from a particularly virulent strain of the virus a year before, and parents were eager to get their kids immunized as soon as possible.
Under Washington law, adults don’t even need to see their doctors to get flu shots. They can get them at Walgreens, directly from pharmacists. But because children under nine are more susceptible to rare but life-threatening allergic reactions, they must be immunized by a physician. This meant that, for convenience sake, parents often scheduled their kids’ annual checkup on flu shot day, thus allowing them to condense much of their routine care into a single visit.
That particular Saturday went off without a hitch, with my father and I seeing and immunizing around 60 patients between the two of us over a 12-hour day.
Three months later, a representative from the insurance company requested to see some of the patient charts from that flu clinic as part of an audit. Aimed at rooting out insurance fraud by cross-checking doctors’ records, these audits have become a routine fixture in medical practices today. To incentivize their auditors to ferret out the greatest possible number of irregularities, and thus boost the corporate bottom line, auditors work on commission, being paid a percentage of the funds they recover.
The auditor in charge of my case failed to turn up any irregularities in our documentation. But, still, she issued a stern admonition to my father and me, ordering us not to open our clinic on Saturdays to administer flu shots.
This struck me as an outrageous restriction, considering our clinic is a private entity where we set our own hours and schedule accordingly, and so I called the auditor. But instead of backing down, she ratcheted up her rhetoric, saying she was also forbidding me from examining my patients before immunizing them; clearly a bid to save her employer even more money. I was shocked. Her directive amounted to practicing medicine without a medical license — which is, of course, illegal in the state of Washington and many other states across the nation.
I shot back that immunizing infants and small children is a serious undertaking, requiring proper caution and care, informed her there was no way I would be complying with her mandate. Following this brief exchange, she took it upon herself to report me to the Medical Quality Assurance Board, the government-backed body charged with shielding the public from unqualified or unfit doctors. The accusation levied against me? Not following an insurance company mandate which, in her opinion, amounted to unprofessional conduct.
It didn’t matter that the charges against me were ludicrous. The potential consequences were only too real, and potentially catastrophic. Had the State Medical Board decided against me, I could have lost my license. I hired a lawyer, sinking more than $8,000 into legal fees. I was cleared last month by a unanimous committee vote. But other physicians facing similar situations may not be as lucky.
The 18 months of excruciating stress that followed my altercation with the auditor made it patently clear that insurance companies wield far too much power. Bureaucrats are making life-and-death medical decisions without a single minute of medical training, and their auditors are terrorizing physicians, by coercing state medical boards to act as their henchman. Unfettered by any consequences for enforcing policies that fly in the face of rules protecting patient safety, insurance companies will continue to harm doctors and patients alike if no one can stop them.
Niran S. Al-Agba is a pediatrician who blogs at MommyDoc.
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