SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
CVS is finally trying to do something about the opioid epidemic:
Drug-store chain CVS Health announced Thursday that it will limit opioid prescriptions in an effort to combat the epidemic that accounted for 64,000 overdose deaths last year alone.
Amid pressure on pharmacists, doctors, insurers and drug companies to take action, CVS also said it would boost funding for addiction programs, counseling and safe disposal of opioids.
[...] The company's prescription drug management division, CVS Caremark, which provides medications to nearly 90 million people, said it would use its sweeping influence to limit initial opioid prescriptions to seven-day supplies for new patients facing acute ailments.
It will instruct pharmacists to contact doctors when they encounter prescriptions that appear to offer more medication than would be deemed necessary for a patient's recovery. The doctor would be asked to revise it. Pharmacists already reach out to physicians for other reasons, such as when they prescribe medications that aren't covered by a patient's insurance plan.
The plan also involves capping daily dosages and initially requiring patients to get versions of the medications that dispense pain relief for a short period instead of a longer duration.
[...] "The whole effort here is to try to reduce the number of people who are going to end up with some sort of opioid addiction problem," CVS Chief Medical Officer Troyen Brennan said in an interview.
It appears this initiative is limited to initial filling of prescriptions — there is no mention of changes in the handling of refills.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday September 25 2017, @04:23PM (4 children)
The CDC [cdc.gov] reports that opioid overdose is the #1 cause of death for Americans under the age of 55. It kills more non-elderly people than car crashes, guns, or suicide. The New York Times [nytimes.com] article on it notes an 8-fold increase between 1990 and today. Based on that, I think it's safe to say that they are trying to respond to a real problem. Their approach might not work, but to claim this is nonsense when people are dying by the thousands is flat wrong.
Anecdotally: I live near one of the worst areas for overdose deaths in the US, and have buried 2 acquaintances so far, struck down in young adulthood by heroin. Both of them were injured, took their prescribed opioid painkillers, switched to heroin when the prescription ran out, and tried rehab programs but remained hooked, and it went on to kill them.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday September 25 2017, @05:32PM (3 children)
The thing is, even if they had been able to keep their prescriptions the legal opioids necessary to relieve the pain would have killed them. Probably not quite as quickly. The problem is that the size of the minimum effective dose keeps increasing, and while the tolerance also increases, it increases more slowly. Opioids are truly lousy for chronic pain, though suited to severe acute pain. Even then there are indications that using an opioid for acute pain makes it more likely that you'll eventually become addicted, perhaps decades later.
That said, there don't seem to be any good choices for severe chronic pain. Certainly none that are legal, and the ones that are illegal are generally illegal to even investigate. Acupuncture is an exception, but reports of it being successful seem to be rare compared to reports of it failing. This could be down to the skill of the practitioner, of course. Skilled meditators seem to be able to suppress extreme acute pain, but I know of no reports on their abilities with chronic pain...and to be effective as a treatment the skill would need to be learned while in the course of chronic pain.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday September 25 2017, @07:11PM
Absolutely.
In places that allow research, it appears that cannibis would be a much better choice: It helps a lot with pain, it's not physically addictive, and has far fewer other negative side effects. But for reasons that have far more to do with racism and hippie-punching than science, the US government's official position is that cannibis is more dangerous than PCP [usdoj.gov].
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Tuesday September 26 2017, @01:35AM (1 child)
You're assuming that Thexalon's friends were still in pain when they finished their opioid prescriptions. Nothing he said suggests that's the case. More likely (and here's where I make assumptions!) they were simply hooked on an addictive drug.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday September 26 2017, @04:23PM
Actually, I wasn't talking about any particular case. Rather I was talking about characteristics of the opioids. I don't know his friends, and that is irrelevant to my point.
Well, not totally irrelevant. Opioids *are* addictive, and addicts tend, by definition, to strive hard to acquire the drug to which they are addicted. OTOH, I knew a person in college who said that tobacco was a harder drug for him to kick than heroin, and this was later echoed by Synanon. My suspicion is that it varies from individual to individual, but that part of the reason tobacco is so hard to kick is its wide availability. (That's not the only reason. Commercial cigarettes have a secondary addictive substance mixed into the paper. The way I succeeded in quitting the second time was by switching to an organic cigarette [Shermans], and then gradually increasing the time between cigarettes. [The first time was easy. I just quit immediately. That didn't work the second time.])
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.