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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (690084)	12/25/2012 7:26:11 PM
From: FJB	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574267

Gupta: Let's end the prescription drug death epidemic By Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN updated 11:57 AM EST, Mon November 19, 2012 (CNN) -- It's the biggest man-made epidemic in the United States. That's how a doctor in Washington state described it to me as we sat outside the state Capitol in Olympia. He was talking about accidental death from prescription drug overdoses. The doctor, Gary Franklin, medical director for Washington state's Department of Labor and Industries, recounted terrifying case after case and told me it was the saddest thing he had ever seen. I remember him telling me about a teenager dying because he had taken too much narcotic medication after a dental procedure. The most common scenario, he said, involves a man in his 40s or 50s who visits a doctor with a backache and walks out with a pain pill prescription. About three years later, typically, the man dies in his sleep from taking too many pills, or mixing them with alcohol. Dr. Sanjay Gupta They don't intend to die, but more than 20,000 times a year -- every 19 minutes, on average -- that is exactly what happens. Accidental overdoses are now a leading cause of accidental deaths in the United States, surpassing car crashes. As a neurosurgeon working in a busy level 1 trauma hospital, I had an idea that the problem was growing -- but the numbers still boggle the mind. Distribution of morphine, the main ingredient in popular painkillers, increased 600% from 1997-2007, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. In the United States, we now prescribe enough pain pills to give every man, woman and child one every four hours, around the clock, for three weeks. Cont... cnn.com

To: Brumar89 who wrote (690084)	12/25/2012 8:21:07 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1574267

The "about half" figure came from an article in the LA Times that is dated, where they found that 47% of those who died from ODs had prescriptions for one or more of the contributing drugs. I cannot put my hands on that article now. But the following information is available from a CDC study, and you can see those numbers are close: "Among patients who are prescribed opioids, an estimated 80% are prescribed low doses (<100 mg morphine equivalent dose per day) by a single practitioner (7,8), and these patients account for an estimated 20% of all prescription drug overdoses </br>(Figure 3). Another 10% of patients are prescribed high doses (=100 mg morphine equivalent dose per day) of opioids by single prescribers and account for an estimated 40% of prescription opioid overdoses (9,10). The remaining 10% of patients are of greatest concern. These are patients who seek care from multiple doctors and are prescribed high daily doses, and account for another 40% of opioid overdoses (11)."0 These are not deaths, so those figures would be different, and they include only opiods, which doesn't represent the full picture (since people OD on other drugs including cocaine and benzos). This is a broad range, but from the same paragraph: among persons who died of opioid overdoses, a significant proportion did not have a prescription in their records for the opioid that killed them; in West Virginia, Utah, and Ohio, 25%–66% of those who died of pharmaceutical overdoses used opioids originally prescribed to someone else (11–13). It is important to remember that many of those who eventually OD began abusing painkillers in the context of a physician prescribed addiction. I know a kid who was in a bad truck wreck, and two years later was very seriously to the "high dose" painkillers referenced above -- beyond help really. He's still alive but has lost his job, family and may well lose his life over it before it is over (last I heard he was taking Fentonyl (sp?), which is among the deadliest. There are physicians today who are prescribing Methadone for pain, which is an extremely dangerous drug. It is the nature of these drugs that dosages increase over time. For those legitimately seeking pain management, it is necessary, as the amount of Oxycontin that worked for a person six months ago won't make a dent in the same level of pain today. This is not all so much BS. A very large proportion of painkiller deaths are from legally prescribed medication. Rx opiods kill more people in the US than Cocaine and Heroin combined.