Author of The Painful Truth
According to Scientific American, there are approximately 6,800 rare diseases, most of which have no approved treatment. To be considered a rare disease, it must affect fewer than 200,000 Americans. Most rare diseases have limited treatment options. Unfortunately, many types of chronic pain are considered rare diseases for which there are few effective treatments.
The television hit show, Breaking Bad, lionized the idea of making and selling meth. A high school teacher who was dying of lung cancer wanted to leave his family enough funds to live, and he chose drug dealing as a way to achieve his goal. The show ran during the 2008-2013 TV seasons and was regarded by some as the greatest television show of all time.
The CDC Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in March 2016, was meant to provide recommendations for prescribing opioids. It was not meant to mandate policy. Since then, states have developed their own restrictive guidelines for prescribing opioids largely based on the CDC prescribing guideline.
Proposed federal restrictions on prescribing might increase the difficulty of finding doctors who are willing to provide pain patients with opioid prescriptions. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is working to decrease the production of opioids while pursuing legal action against an increasing number of doctors who prescribe opioids.
For the past two weeks, I have been visiting Ireland. I attended a meeting for a few days in Dublin, but then my wife and I toured parts of the beautiful country boasting deeply green meadows that connected huge historic cathedrals and exquisite castles.
On the way from the airport to our hotel when we arrived, we listened to the taxi’s radio broadcast about the heroin crisis in Dublin. The news particularly caught my attention, since we have been hearing from our major media outlets that the opioid crisis is uniquely an American problem.
In a WBUR CommonHealth article, “How I Was Seduced By Cigarettes, And What Set Me Free,” David C. Holzman bravely recalled his struggle with the addiction of nicotine. He was honest enough to describe the stressors in his life that made him vulnerable to the addiction and the changes of fortune that helped him to recover.
Holzman’s article can help dispel some common myths about addiction.
As the American Psychiatric Association says, “Addiction is a complex condition, a brain disease that is manifested by compulsive substance use despite harmful consequence.” That is correct, but many people define addiction incorrectly.
The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) is the watchdog agency that’s responsible for testing new medications before they are approved. Drug manufacturers seek approval from the FDA after they have conducted numerous clinical trials and submitted all of their data to the FDA for review. Drugs are approved only if the FDA believes the data supports the efficacy for the targeted indication and that the drugs’ risks are reasonable and manageable.
“Babies Born Addicted,” “Addicted Babies,” “Babies with Addiction,” and similar headlines appear nearly daily in the media. This is because babies exhibit horrible withdrawal symptoms if they are born physically dependent on opioids, and it pulls at our heartstrings to see them suffer. But it misleads media consumers, policymakers, and family members into believing the newborns are addicted. They confuse signs of withdrawal with opioid addiction.
Confusion is understandable. Yet the fact is that babies cannot be born addicted to drugs, and they don’t deserve the stigma that accompanies the label.
George Shultz has fought the war on drugs. He worked as the Secretary of State during the Reagan Administration when First Lady Nancy Reagan failed to significantly decrease drug abuse with her well-intended, yet overly simplistic, “Just Say No” campaign.
He has a unique perspective on the current drug crisis, since he’s fought in the trenches. Therefore, it’s especially significant that he now admits we have used the wrong tactics and are losing the battle. George P. Shultz and Pedro Aspe provide an accurate and sensible analysis of the current drug crisis in a recent New York Times article.
The future of medicine may have arrived, and it has its benefits — but it might also create an Orwellian, Big Brother culture.
All medical developments are meant to solve a problem. It is estimated that as often as 80% of the time, patients fail to use medication as directed for some diseases. According to The Atlantic, nonadherence (or noncompliance), in general, costs Americans between $100 billion to $289 billion a year. That has led to considerable research focusing on how to improve patients’ compliance.
“Babies Born Addicted,” “Addicted Babies,” “Babies with Addiction,” and similar headlines appear nearly daily in the media. This is because babies exhibit horrible withdrawal symptoms if they are born physically dependent on opioids, and it pulls at our heartstrings to see them suffer. But it misleads media consumers, policymakers, and family members into believing the newborns are addicted. They confuse signs of withdrawal with opioid addiction.