Veterans Suicides 20 per day – MD not paid in 12 months for 5 approved visits

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VA Conducts Nation’s Largest Analysis of Veteran Suicide

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Read the report all you want, but for 12 months I’m not reimbursed. And no explanation why. No wonder they can’t get doctors.

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Yet another call just now from TriWest asking me to treat a veteran. VA crisis lines leave vets in limbo. Calls go to voice mail. Veterans have killed themselves just after calls to crisis lines. A lot of these suicides are due to PTSD. Veterans cannot get the help they need.

 

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I believe it is TriWest who won the contract to schedule suicidal veterans who have Treatment Resistant Depression or PTSD or Bipolar Depression. I treat that. It works except in the most extreme cases, in minutes to just a couple days. It’s simple and safe for outpatient use. It has been tested at NIMH and Yale since 1991. The VA-UCSD psychiatrist referred him and then continued care.

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I will not see one more veteran until I am reimbursed for the 5 pre-approved visits for a veteran I treated 12 months ago. He was better in a few days, the first time in decades he had relief of depression. If you cannot pay me who can relieve treatment resistant Major Depression in 2 days, then honey, no wonder you can’t find docs to help. They limited me to their chosen codes for billing. I spoke to psychiatrists who work with veterans and they have never heard of those codes. I guess they just mean loud and clear: NO PAY. Fine. It was a pay cut to offer and took weeks of paper forms, months of approval – you have to really want to do it. With frequent help from a very experienced clerk and a doggedly informed veteran who knew all the ropes, it took months for paperwork to get rushed through. Plenty of doctors just graduating this month don’t know how many months paperwork takes and they won’t get paid.

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San Diego VA has the worst reputation in the nation. I understand it is the San Diego VA that has the worst lag time delays of several months before veterans can even be seen. Worst in the country. Correct me if I’m wrong. And we have a lot more veterans because warm sunny weather is easier on their bones. Is that any excuse to dis-incentivise any doctor by not paying for services?

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The new veterans suicide hotline does not even return all calls. Public Radio just had an expose’ on this one or two weeks ago.

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Twenty veterans take their life daily.

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Only 30% of people with depression respond to antidepressants.

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Based on publications from major academic centers, treatment resistant depression, it seems, is diagnosed after failing as few as 3 or 4 antidepressants.

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Compare any antidepressant to ketamine with potential relief in hours to a couple days.

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It’s not like this is new. In 1991 ketamine was first studied at NIH for depression. Yale has carried the work forward with them. But people live at home and it has to be cost effective. It is unnecessary and/or unaffordable for most people including taxparers to be paying for IV infusions when many or most patients do well on sublingual or nasal use. It is the #1 drug of abuse in China, so don’t just offer it to any person who needs it. Make sure you understand how important glial modulators are in depression. See Yale with NIMH publication on inflammation in depression, I posted on these pages about 3 or 4 years ago when it came out.

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Yale with NIMH had published that ketamine rapidly creates synapses.

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And Yale has published:

Activation of a ventral hippocampus–medial prefrontal cortex pathway is both necessary and sufficient for an antidepressant response to ketamine

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In January 2012, I posted detailed information:

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Depression PTSD – Ketamine Rapid Relief

 

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• PTSD has a more direct link to suicide than previously thought, a current Texas A&M University study concludes – references below.

• A high lifetime risk of suicide occurs in women who have been sexually and physically abused as young girls.

• More than 300,000 veterans have been diagnosed with PTSD or major depression – many not yet diagnosed.

• Risk of suicide is the highest during the first month of standard antidepressant therapy, and a significant number of patients do not have adequate improvement even after months, resulting in harm to personal and professional lives.
  

• Patients are at suicide risk upon discharge from psychiatric hospitals.
  

• Significant predictors of both suicide attempts and preoccupation with suicide are guilt and anger and impulsive behaviors.

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• Ketamine is the most important breakthrough in treatment of major depression with rapid and lasting effects.

• Ketmine can help immediately, unlike all other antidepressants that may require weeks or months to work, if they help at all. See NPR report here – that appeared soon after I posted this (skip to their last section). It is FDA approved and legal. NPR again reports ketamine’s rapid relief of depression.

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• snip

  snip

• • The medical literature on ketamine use is profoundly important. There are over 6,800 medical publications. Ketamine has potent healing powers. Karl Jansen, psychiatrist in London, believes that “ketamine has potent healing powers when used as an adjunct to psychotherapy.” There is nothing like it; however, treatment for serious depression still requires team support, not medication only.

  •  The World Health Organization reports that disability to due depression is second only to heart disease.

  • Suicide is a catastrophic medical emergency. I cannot stress this enough. Depression is treatable.

  • Your death is unnecessary. It would be a terrible loss to all who love you.

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Please read that entire post January 2012 before you call to ask questions. The calls are very time consuming.

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There is no reason to restrict life and death matters to one drug, and then make it dependent upon only IV infusions. What kind of life is vegetating in depression for decades? It is a short acting drug. I have posted on why ketamine should never be used alone, but must be used with other glial modulators.

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Most troubling:

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Compounded Medications are Not Covered by Any Insurance

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Most people cannot afford compounded medications, especially if disabled due to Major Depression or PTSD or pain – same medications work on mood and pain.

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TAKE ACTION

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Healthy people can get back their lives. These simple steps can be taught across the nation. Millions are needlessly disabled, especially our young adults who are most vulnerable to these disorders, and several hundred thousand of our young veterans.

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An entire nation can get and breathe relief.

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DO THIS:

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Call your favorite politician and relevant organizations who care about healthcare and veterans to STOP the collusion and restraint of trade since all insurers began refusing to cover compounded medications. All these new $100,000 per year medications are paid for by the taxpayers and your insurance deductible that goes up every year. How long will you be able to afford medical care? How long can this restraint of trade be practiced under our noses unless we take action?

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Get this on the Democratic platform this presidential year. It’s a scam perpetuated by multibillion dollar pharma and their mighty rich contributions to congress who are killing affordable medical care.

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Affordable medical care

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These medications must be compounded. How many can afford $200 to $300 or more cash out of pocket just for medications? Or will this become another safe old drug that is bought by a financier, patented, and now they charge $100,000 a year? You know who pays for everything and it ain’t the 1%.

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CDC Opioid Guidelines – The Criticism in today’s Practical Pain Management

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Criticism of the CDC Opioid Guidelines

from today’s Practical Pain Management

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This excellent journal is edited by the gifted, much loved, and opinionated Forrest Tennant, MD, who we like to count on for not holding back. I missed it in the brief look I did today – this is necessarily sober.

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Following criticism of the CDC Opioid guidelines, please read important information on suicide prevention, below, and how Vancouver has prevented deaths from opioid overdose. At Vancouver’s clean supervised drug injection centers: Over the last 13 years, millions of injections have occurred at Insite and there have been no deaths.

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Two things stand out, on this page of criticism of the CDC Opioid Guidelines. In particular:

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1.  The heartfelt, pointed comment by Daniel Carr, MD, the President of the American Academy of Pain Medicine(AAPM)

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2.  Organizations that have criticized the CDC Opioid Guidelines

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Directly quoting, below:

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However, some have not responded to the CDC’s guidelines with unconditional support. A number of criticisms have been expressed by organizations, like the American Medical Association (AMA), the American Academy of Pain Medicine(AAPM), and the American Academy of Pain Management, that question the validity and quality of the guideline’s featured recommendations.

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[Emphasis mine]

The criticisms surround the CDC guideline’s low-quality evidence base, which excludes all data from studies investigating opioid efficacy recorded from 3 months to 1 year duration. This is a concerning omission, according to Daniel B. Carr, MD, President of the AAPM, because the guidelines are intended for treating pain that lasts longer than 3 months. By contrast, associations like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) do accept studies in this longer range.

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AAPM Response

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In a statement released by AAPM, the association said they cautiously support the efforts of the CDC to address the challenges that often accompany prescribing opioids for chronic non-cancer pain.

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“We know that doctors—primary care and pain medicine specialists—are integral in treating pain wisely and carefully monitoring for signs of substance abuse. Abuse and diversion of prescription opioids must be addressed,” said Dr. Carr, Professor of Public Health and Community Medicine at Tufts University. “Opioids are not the usual first choice for treating chronic non-cancer pain, but they are an important option—as part of a comprehensive multidisciplinary approach— that must remain available to physicians and appropriately selected patients.”

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Dr. Carr said that society needs to address both chronic pain and its treatment as public health challenges. This view is endorsed by the National Academy of Medicine and outlined in the draft National Pain Strategy from the NIH.

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[emphasis mine]

“Public health problems are typically complex; well-meaning, but narrowly targeted, interventions often provoke unanticipated consequences,” he said. “We share concerns voiced by patient and professional groups, and other Federal agencies, that the CDC guideline makes disproportionately strong recommendations based upon a narrowly selected portion of the available clinical evidence. It is incumbent upon us all to monitor the deployment of the guideline to ensure that it does not inadvertently encourage under-treatment, marginalization, and stigmatization of the many patients with chronic pain that are using opioids appropriately.

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The AMA’s response:

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“While we are largely supportive of the guidelines, we remain concerned about the evidence base informing some of the recommendations, conflicts with existing state laws and product labeling, and possible unintended consequences associated with implementation, which includes access and insurance coverage limitations for non-pharmacologic treatments, especially comprehensive care, and the potential effects of strict dosage and duration limits on patient care,” said Patrice A. Harris, MD, the AMA board chair-elect and chair of the AMA Task Force to Reduce Opioid Abuse.

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“We know this is a difficult issue that doesn’t have easy solutions and if these guidelines help reduce the deaths resulting from opioids, they will prove to be valuable. If they produce unintended consequences, we will need to mitigate them. They are not the final word. More needs to be done, and we plan to continue working at the state and federal level to engage policy makers to take steps that will help end this epidemic.”

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Very sobering issues and too many deaths from opioid overdose. Whether alone, in combination with alcohol or other sedatives and sleeping pills, the focus is on opioid dosages.

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The fear is what the DEA will do in response to the guidelines. The immediate reality is that insurance formularies have changed in strange and unpredictable ways the last few months. As always, we may need to adjust dosing as patients age or illnesses enter into an evolving lifetime of care. Be prepared to change the dose, alert to doses that may be too high for their current medical condition, and always alert to opioid misuse, addiction, misjudgement, and mental health. Be wise and do the right thing.

 

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Suicide prevention

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The New York Times published March 9, 2015 on Blocking the Paths to Suicide, rethinking prevention.

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Sometimes, depression isn’t even in the picture. In one study, 60 percent of college students who said they were thinking about ways to kill themselves tested negative for depression.

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“There are kids for whom it’s very difficult to predict suicide — there doesn’t seem to be that much that is wrong with them.

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 Suicide can be a very impulsive act, especially among the young, and therefore difficult to predict.

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About 90 percent of the people who try suicide and live ultimately never die by suicide. If the people who died had not had easy access to lethal means, researchers like Dr. Miller reason, most would still be alive.

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“People think of suicide in this linear way, as if you get more and more depressed and go on to create a more specific plan,” Ms. Barber said.

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Dr. Igor Galynker, the director of the Family Center for Bipolar Disorder at Mount Sinai Beth Israel, noted that in one study, 60 percent of patients who died by suicide after their discharge from an acute care psychiatric unit were judged to be at low risk.

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“The assessments are not good,” he said. So Dr. Galynker and his colleagues are developing a novel suicide assessment to predict imminent risk, based upon new findings about the acute suicidal state.

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In fact, suicide is often a convergence of factors leading to a sudden, tragic event. In one study of people who survived a suicide attempt, almost half reported that the whole process, from the first suicidal thought to the final act, took 10 minutes or less.

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Among those who thought about it a little longer (say, for about an hour), more than three-quarters acted within 10 minutes once the decision was made.

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. . . growing evidence of suicide’s unpredictability, coupled with studies showing that means restriction can work, may leave public health officials little choice if they wish to reduce suicide rates.

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Ken Baldwin, who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge and lived, told reporters that he knew as soon as he had jumped that he had made a terrible mistake. He wanted to live. Mr. Baldwin was lucky.

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Ms. Barber tells another story: On a friend’s very first day as an emergency room physician, a patient was wheeled in, a young man who had shot himself in a suicide attempt. “He was begging the doctors to save him,” she said. But they could not.

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Addiction

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Let us never forget the curse of addiction, and the profound misunderstanding our leaders make: it is a medical condition, not a choice. The war on drugs must be transformed from militarization of addiction to medicalization of addiction. Like Canada, Portugal and some of the South American countries.

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The New York Times writes this week of Vancouver’s clean supervised drug injection centers. Over the last 13 years, millions of injections have occurred at Insite and there have been no deaths.

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opioid and heroin overdose deaths are preventable. The drug Naloxone, which blocks the effects of heroin, is a safe, inexpensive antidote when someone is available to administer it, as is the case at Insite.

 

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Coda

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After all this, it feels like we’ve advanced a long way into the 21st century. Old stuff does not work. There sure is a whole bunch of stuff that no longer works. Life happened, and moved along.

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This site is not for email.

If any questions, please schedule an appointment with my office.

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The material on this site is for informational purposes only.

It is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis or treatment

provided by a qualified health care provider.

Relevant comments are welcome.

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For My Home Page, click here:  Welcome to my Weblog on Pain Management!

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Please be aware any advertising on this free educational website is

NOT advocated by me and NOT approved by me.

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Opioids Kill White Americans – Is it opioids or suicide or addiction or untreated pain?

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“Drug Overdoses Propel Rise in

Mortality Rates of Young Whites“

New York Times

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Yes, white Americans, headlined yesterday by Gina Kolata and Sarah Cohen, New York Times science writers.  This article points to the highest mortality in young whites. See post early November on the Princeton researchers who reported deaths in white Americans. True, infants and children have severe pain, but this new article is on young white adults.

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Those who are anti-opioid and those who lost a loved one from opioids and heroin (an opioid that helps pain), will send in comments to the paper so that everyone can see how bad opioids are. Most patients who take opioids are too disabled from pain to write.

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Pain is stigmatized, opioids stigmatized, people in pain are stigmatized, doctors who treat pain are stigmatized. Any wonder 97% of medical schools do not teach pain management?

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Is it opioids or suicide or addiction or untreated pain that is killing our youth?

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How many suicides have opioids prevented? Americans make up less than 5% of the global population but consume 80% of the world’s supply of opioid prescription pills. What if your cancer pain now becomes severe intractable chronic pain? Cancer has been changing. The survival rate has increased, and many of these cancer patients treated with opioid therapy, survived the cancer but have residual chronic pain from cancer or its treatment. Surely they are among the 18,000 white people who died.

 

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Please read the earlier post this week on the ethics of opioid treatment, on

CDC’s imminent radical cut in opioid doses for 100 million patients nationwide.

Use search function above photo – type in CDC or DEA.

Your pain. Your lives. Their profit.

A thorny problem.

Tell us what happened to you. Doctors, tell us what you are seeing.

Have you been denied disability due to pain? Denied non-opioid treatment?

Chronic severe pain affects forty million Americans.

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Some insurers have denied or limited non-opioid treatments yet continued expensive opioids for decades. Has your insurance refused your treatment? Pain specialists have been barraged by denials for years.  Please comment below.

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As noted last week, I have spent 15 years developing alternatives to failed opioid treatment for chronic intractable pain and writing about that on these pages since April 2009. But opioids must be available as last resort.

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FACT:

• Opioids killed almost 18,000 Americans in 2014 – prescription opioids, not street drugs.

• 40 million American millions with severe pain, millions not thousands

• 100 million with chronic pain.

• CDC will imminently, radically cut everyone’s opioid dose

• Health insurers will oblige, and incidentally show increased profit to shareholders

• Suicide increases with untreated pain

• Death rates for “whites ages 25 to 34 was five times its level in 1999”

• This age group has more injuries from work and play that can lead to disability, job loss

• Insurance is unaffordable or not purchased by many young adults

• My own colleagues cannot afford high deductibles – prescriptions are now counted in deductibles, now unaffordable

• Can you afford $20,000 per month for your opioid or is cheap heroin more affordable? Can you afford your usual drugs on Medicare once you are in the “donut hole.” Can you afford $28 per day, $840 per month for gout, when colchicine was 12 cents a day a couple years ago?
  

  • Do insurance denials increase liklihood of cheaper alternatives such as heroin or illegal marijuana resulting in death by drug dealer?

  • Do exhorbitant costs of opioids lead insurers to deny your medication?

• Insurers have refused to pay for abuse-deterrent and tamper-resistant formulations of opioids

•  Insurers have refused to pay for proven, widely accepted, nonopioid analgesics:

  • Lyrica

  • Horizant

  • Gralise

  • Cymbalta

  • Does it help the DEA and NIH and universities to teach those as nonopioid alternatives when they are not covered and not affordable the rest of your life?

  • Insurers deny every known compounded analgesic though low cost and effective, even for Tricare’s disabled veterans, even 5% lidocaine ointment for nerve pain, dextromethorphan, oxytocin, low dose naltrexone – Stanford published research on naltrexone years ago and now doing research on it again for CRPS, many many others

  • Insurers deny proven analgesics that are used by armed forces, university hospitals, select doctors, for life threatening pain: ketamine
    

  • Insurers deny off-label analgesics that may work better than opioids, e.g. memantine, an Alzheimers drug – can relieve intractable nerve pain (French publication on CRPS/RSD pain)
    

  • Insurers deny medications that reduce side effects of opioids, e.g. nonaddicting modafinil popular with students, to increase alertness when opioids cause drowsiness that may cause injury, death – gosh 10 years ago!

  • Is drowsiness the cause of some of those 18,000 opioid deaths?
    

• Health insurers have refused coverage for treatments such as P.T., psychotherapy for coping skills, blocks.
  

• Insurers deny medications that relieve the withering side effects of opioid withdrawal, making it impossible for many to taper off, e.g. Adderall, Wellbutrin (dopamine)
  

• Cannabis, a nonopioid, classified by US Congress as Schedule I, illegal federally for human use, illegal to take on a plane or cross state/national borders, found on meteorites, made by sponges and some of the earliest living species on the planet, used for thousands of years for pain, while cocaine and methamphetamine are classified as Schedule II for prescription purposes.
  

• Opioids, even vicodin, require monthly doctor visits, costs, monthly for sixty years

• Why whites dying of opioids? People of color are denied prescription opioids. Stark data published for decades.

• Heroin is an opioid, cheap and available; its “unAmerican” – used in England for pain, used thousands of years for pain

• Untreated pain is one reason people turn to heroin, affordable is another

• Violence and drinking and taking drugs can begin with chronic pain and job loss, not always the other way around, chicken egg

• Opioids cost pennies to make, patient’s cost is $20,000 per month for Rx. Insurers paid what the market would bear… in the old days. Who is trapped in the middle of this fight for shareholder profit?
  

  • How many of us would take 2 or 4 extra pain pills when pain spikes to extreme for days?

  • If you are disabled, can you afford insurance or expensive prescription drugs?

• “Poverty and stress, for example, are risk factors for misuse of prescription narcotics,” Dr. Hayward said.

• When you are not getting enough sleep and rest, working too many hours overtime or 3 jobs, inflammation and pain spikes

• Misuse of opioids in > 33% (perhaps 48%?) of cancer patients at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in high resource settings when insurance was better, published 1990’s.

• Cancer pain – usually time limited. Intractable chronic pain – forever.
  .How many jobs will be lost and how many suicides when CDC imminently imposes strict cuts in opioids?

•  DEA recently requires every pain patient taking opioids, including those with cancer, to be diagnosed “Opioid Dependent” — not only addicts – the same diagnosis for pain patients includes addicts. The term “addiction” has been equated to dependence by most psychiatrist over the past 30 years. It may be interesting to see what criteria are used to define “addiction” if any, in DSM V. Some important members acknowledge that the addition of dependence into addiction in DSM-III was a mistake….the DSM-V criteria will get rid of “abuse”, and will include craving. it will also apparently eliminate the legal/criminal criteria. DSM comments are extracted from here, with many good arguments on this epidemic, such as: “The US is leading the way in eradicating pain, but in doing so has created an unwanted byproduct: painkiller addiction.”
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  What would you want if you had intense chronic pain?

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  “For too many, and especially for too many women,” she said, “they are not in stable relationships, they don’t have jobs, they have children they can’t feed and clothe, and they have no support network.”

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  “It’s not medical care, it’s life,” she said. “There are people whose lives are so hard they break.”

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Opioids kill – or is it untreated pain?

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Pain kills, a maleficent force.

No one can help you. Only you have the tools to do it

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Alarms went off for me on radical opioid cuts in October and I posted when

DEA suddenly held conferences across the nation on sharply cutting opioid doses.

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How many of us especially seniors and male persons refuse to learn or use coping skills that

reduce pain without medication?

How many of us refuse to diet and lose weight to reduce pain and/or disability?

Politicians are sued if they tax sales of sugar loaded soft drinks.

One single can of soda per day exceeds acceptable sugar limits for entire day.

Snacks need to say much much time it takes to burn off fat –

quarter of large pizza 449 calories, walk off 1 hr 23 min;

large coke 140 calories, walk off 30 minutes.

Foods can be anti-inflammatory or pro-inflammatory.

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Obesity is pro-inflammatory.

So is lack of sleep.

People who sleep with animals in their bed and their bedroom, I’m talking to you.

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Yes, pain is in your mind.

Chronic back pain is no longer in the back, it’s in the brain, the pain matrix.

It’s behavior, not just pills. Pain is an emotional and psychosocial  and spiritual experience.

Work on it! Constantly.

Lord forbid we should teach stress reduction and meditation in grade school

and improve school lunches before kids start looking for heroin for pain.

Yes, kids have chronic pain, are sleep deprived, often obese.

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Isn’t this all un-American?

Injuries, pain, habits, pace activities, learn to avoid and treat pain – start young.

Taxpayers end up paying for ignorance and disability.

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I will soon be posting published research that documents health insurers have refused to pay for nonopioid treatment and how health care policy aimed at all people with chronic pain leads to suicide when drastic cuts are made to opioid doses – Washington State we are looking at you. Florida you’ve made headlines and 60 Minutes TV specials years ago.

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Do please comment below if your health insurer has refused medication, physical therapy, psycho-therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, stress reduction, for chronic pain.

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How many of you have been denied social security disability by doctors who don’t know how to diagnose RSD, Complex Regional Pain Syndrome? Let me know. I will pass on that data to researchers collecting information on untreated pain.

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I have written many times on these pages, and more often than ever these past years as insurers cut back more and more. This will rapidly get worse. We need your data.

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Please send in your stories. You are not alone.

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So many issues. Steven Passik, PhD, was interview by Lynn Webster, MD – emphasis in bold is mine. Dr. Passik pioneered in management of chronic pain and pain in addicts. He has read some of Dr. Webster’s book. “You’re calling, the need for love and connection and all those things in the book, I’ve been – what’s largely lacking is outright, at times animosity towards people with pain and I think there’s a lot of projections sometimes because the therapy – the stigmatized disease – treated in stigmatized people with stigmatized drugs and interventions and so, it’s like a hat trick of stigma.  I’ve been to my share of pain conferences lately that people are really talking about, “Okay, well there’s come a realization that opioid-only, drug-only therapy, is really not going to work to the best majority of this population.  It doesn’t [mean] that opioids should be ignored and we’ll get into that later, but that they’re going to work in isolation and should never been expected to.  And then they start advocating things that are a lot like supportive and cognitive behavioral therapy and to be practiced basically by the primary care physician or the pain doctor.  And the idea that, to me that’s in a way comical because as a psychologist myself, we’re dealing with the system wherein cognitive behavioral therapists can’t even get paid to do cognitive behavioral therapy.  And so, I think something’s got to give, and I think one of the main obstacle is that – and this really gets into the next question as well but I’ll come back to that more specifically – but when people have a set of whatever chronic condition that involves psychiatric motivational, lifestyle, spiritual as well as nociceptive elements, and we put a premium only on what you do to people, prescribed to people, put in people, take out of people, and then that’s only going to relegate the other kinds of treatment or the other kinds of ways in which a caring physician and treatment team would spend time with the patient to the very poorly reimbursed category.  You’ll always going to have a problem with people being treated with the kind of respect that should go along with treating that kind of an illness and it’s not unique even to chronic pain.  I’ve seen treatment scenarios with people who are taking care of people with pancreatic cancer, have an afternoon clinic that has 45 people in it.  I mean how you – something’s got to give in our healthcare systems and I do think that patients are going to have to stand up and say, “I don’t want to be on a conveyor belt.  I want to spend some time and make a connection with the people that are taking care of me and it’s not just about the piece paper in my hands, for a prescription or that I walk out the door with.”

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 The New York Times article further says:

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…This is the smallest proportional and absolute gap in mortality between blacks and whites at these ages for more than a century,” Dr. Skinner said. If the past decade’s trends continue, even without any further progress in AIDS mortality, rates for blacks and whites will be equal in nine years, he said….

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…Not many young people die of any cause. In 2014, there were about 29,000 deaths out of a population of about 25 million whites in the 25-to-34 age group. That number had steadily increased since 2004, rising by about 5,500 — about 24 percent — while the population of the group as a whole rose only 5 percent. In 2004, there were 2,888 deaths from overdoses in that group; in 2014, the number totaled 7,558….

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…For young non-Hispanic whites, the death rate from accidental poisoning — which is mostly drug overdoses — rose to 30 per 100,000 from six over the years 1999 to 2014, and the suicide rate rose to 19.5 per 100,000 from 15, the Times analysis found….

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…For non-Hispanic whites ages 35 to 44, the accidental poisoning rate rose to 29.9 from 9.6 in that period. And for non-Hispanic whites ages 45 to 54 — the group studied by Dr. Case and Dr. Deaton — the poisoning rate rose to 29.9 per 100,000 from 6.7 and the suicide rate rose to 26 per 100,000 from 16, the Times analysis found….

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…Eileen Crimmins, a professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California, said the causes of death in these younger people were largely social — “violence and drinking and taking drugs.” Her research shows that social problems are concentrated in the lower education group.

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The material on this site is for informational purposes only.

It is not a substitute for medical advice,

diagnosis or treatment provided by a qualified health care provider.

Relevant comments are welcome.

If any questions, please call the office to schedule an appointment.

This site is not email for personal questions.

~~~~~

For My Home Page, click here:  Welcome to my Weblog on Pain Management!

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Please be aware any advertising on this free website is

NOT advocated by me and NOT approved by me.

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CDC Will Create New Injuries & Suicide with Unprecedented Experiment in Sudden Opioid Changes – Prediction

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Tapering patients without sound and attainable alternatives

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Tampering with patient autonomy

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Failure to provide informed consent

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Avoidance of coercion

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Nonmeleficence – Do No Harm – Primum non nocere

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Treating patients like numbers not individualized

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Intellectual and academic dishonesty

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Anti-opioid zealots supported by zealous insurers? 

Containment of drug costs, not pain

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Failure to assess risk vs benefit

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Chronic pain has long term consequences including

brain atrophy and memory loss

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We have a duty to preserve life, and relieve suffering.

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Is it morally wrong to do nothing when almost 18,000 Americans died of prescription opioids in 2014?

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Is it morally right to radically chop the opioid dose of everyone in severe pain?

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Are we relying on drugs rather than coping skills and physical therapy?

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CDC will profoundly limit opioid doses to 100 mg/day morphine maximum or its equivalent for severe pain.  Is this safe? Ethical? See several previous posts on the dosage limits and CDC proposal.

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Michael E. Schatman, PhD, who edited “Ethical Issues in Chronic Pain Management,” lectures nationally on optimal treatment for chronic pain when ethical principals collide, has published “The role of the health insurance industry in perpetuating suboptimal pain management.” Medical ethics is not a business model of “cost containment and profitability.” His essay “addressed some of the insurance industry’s efforts to delegitimize chronic pain and its treatment as a whole.” He examined the industry’s “self-serving strategies, which include failure to reimburse services and certain medications irrespective of their evidence-bases for clinical efficacy and cost-efficiency; ‘carving out’ specific services from interdisciplinary treatment programs; and delaying and/or interrupting the provision of medically necessary treatment.”

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Many of the above ideas are taken from the course on ethics he taught May 2015 at the American Pain Society annual meeting.

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I have spent 15 years developing alternatives to failed opioid treatment for chronic intractable pain and writing about that on these pages since April 2009. When patients have failed all known treatments, low cost  alternatives to opioid medications become unaffordable when not covered by insurance – cost may be $300/month out-of-pocket rather than a $30 copay for opioids costing $17,000/month. How many can afford $300/month for the rest of their lives when they are on disability with severe chronic pain?

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When there are no options, opioids are the last resort.

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There is no argument opioids are often misused when there are better choices of treatment but resources are lacking, even more so in rural and under-served communities. And studies show lack of evidence of benefit with opioid treatment — but my patients would not be able to work or care for themselves if not on opioid therapy.

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Opioids cause pain by creating inflammation in the innate immune sytem (brain/spinal cord).

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There is no argument that opioids can cause central sensitization – that means higher doses cause worse pain which is misinterpreted as requiring more opioid when instead pain would improve with less. Opioids cause increasing numbers of deaths (almost 18,000 deaths in USA in 2014 from prescription opioids, NOT street drugs). Opioids may lead to addiction and diversion. Efficacy of many drugs is often compromised by some form of toxicity or need to add drugs to treat side effects, often denied by insurers.

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Likewise there is misuse of surgery, procedures, nerve blocks, spinal cord stimulators, pumps which can lead to paralysis, anxiety, depression, insomnia and death. How many billions are spent on spine surgeries done simply for pain that is not surgically treatable?

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Opioids may be treating anxiety, mental health problems or addictions, but they also serve an important function in relieving pain. They may be the only option many patients have. Opioid taper can uncover or cause PTSD, depression, anxiety, insomnia, fear of withdrawal symptoms, inability to cope. Poorly managed or sudden opioid withdrawal can lead to severe hypertension, stroke, heart attack and/or intolerable side effects of substitute drugs.

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The disabled insurance system has shut down patient autonomy, by closing more than 1,000 interdisciplinary pain programs — now only 70. And are those truly interdisciplinary? or are they strictly procedure oriented with $50,000 pumps and spinal cord stimulators that have failed to work for my patients? Have they ever shown long lasting efficacy for 5 years? Have you seen the

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“Chronic pain a malefic force”

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“Pain kills”

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John Liebeskind, MD

Past President American Pain Society

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Tapering opioids in chronic pain is very different from tapering opioids in addicts and much more difficult than treating cancer pain.

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Unlike cancer pain, severe chronic intractable pain is endless, lifelong, day and night, often associated with depression, insomnia, anxiety, PTSD, hypertension, and disability caused by severe pain.

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Having taught cancer pain at an 800 bed cancer hospital, cancer pain may be easier to treat simply because most cancer pain is acute pain which responds better to opioids than chronic pain. Cancer is often treatable and pain resolves. And insurers are not battering doctors by denying medications for pain every couple months as they do for chronic pain. Stress! Denials nonstop! Paperwork instead of practice of medicine. Doctors cannot take the constant battering and leave.

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This unprecedented radical frightening cut in medication comes from the CDC National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.

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The CDC excluded cancer patients from this new chopping block.

Will that come next?

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QUESTIONS FOR THE CDC & ANTI-OPIOIDISTS

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 Where is the data? What is the risk/benefit ratio for this radical cut in dosage? There is no evidence upon which to base their chosen dose.

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40 million Americans have severe pain, 17.6% of the adult population, not counting children with severe pain or adults with moderate pain.

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Will the CDC monitor the increase in auto accidents that occurs from untreated pain? People with incident pain have slowed reaction times due to pain. Despite normal strength and cognitive function, they may not be able to move muscles quickly due to untreated pain. They may not be able to move at all when severe pain clouds even the ability to think.

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Will CDC monitor risk of suicides from untreated pain? Columbia University recently published on suicide in only one pain syndrome, but there are many forms of severe pain, not just one.

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When will NIH and CDC fund research on medications besides opioids for treatment of pain?

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Will CDC monitor how many days of lost work, lost jobs from opioid withdrawal?

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Will CDC monitor how many new injuries occur from untreated pain? My patients may be perfectly strong, but cannot prevent falling if sudden pain prevents them from stabilizing their hips, legs, or spine.

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How suddenly do they demand this be implemented? Insurers have already been cutting opioids for months and allow 30 days on the last prescription. What then?

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Will CDC recommend that insurers provide medications for opioid withdrawal?

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Will CDC recommend that insurers allow payment of  medications such as Wellbutrin to replace dopamine for the depression malaise that occurs after opioid withdrawal that may last for one year or more?

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Will CDC recommend admission to hospital programs when patients are unable to suddenly drop opioid dose to the magical 100 mg without supervised inpatient care?

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Will CDC have nationwide training programs for doctors to teach how to deal with and study the sequellae of this unprecedented population experiment in suicide, new injuries, depression and hopelessness in patients and even physicians?

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Will CDC recommend anything for untreated pain after opioid reduction?

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Emily Dickinson

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Pain has an element of blank;

It cannot recollect

When it began, or if there were

A day when it was not.

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It has no future but itself,

Its infinite realms contain

It’s past, enlightened to perceive

New periods of pain.

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The material on this site is for informational purposes only.

It is not a substitute for medical advice,

diagnosis or treatment provided by a qualified health care provider.

Relevant comments are welcome.

If any questions, please call the office to schedule an appointment.

This site is not for email.

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For My Home Page, click here:  Welcome to my Weblog on Pain Management!

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Please be aware any advertising on this free website is

NOT advocated by me and NOT approved by me.

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Insurers Refusing to Cover Pain Medication – Morphine 100 mg per Day Maximum – Opioid Wake up Call – New Nationwide Standard? DEA Mandate

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The FDA mandated 22 manufacturers of long acting opioids

to fund a program on opioid prescribing.

FDA dictated the content.

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I attended the SCOPE of PAIN program Friday November 6, from 8 to 12:30, taught by an Addictionologist from Portland with our local Southern California DEA. Continuing education credit was given by Boston University. The first grant recipient was in 2012.  

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My take:

I think we will rapidly see a 100 mg per day

maximum morphine equivalent allowed

Could I be interpreting this wrong?

Insurers simply deny paying for high doses. They have begun already.

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I am exhausted from ICD10 diagnosis coding – complex patients !!! – that has taken away any possibility I could leave my desk until 4 AM for the last four weeks, in midst of moving office to much better place, and midst the only two computer crashes I have ever had in my pursuit of efficient tech, plus dental fracture, so much more….perfect storm. The paragraphs could be edited and rearranged, so they would be in sequence but they’re not.

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I hope others will give me their take on this. It has been getting worse since almost all university interdisciplinary pain clinics were closed in 1991. Insurers, i.e. managed care clerks, are practicing medicine mandates set forth by anonymous committees looking at spreadsheets not at our complex care. Insurers could save many billions if they invested a few billions in education. Insurers wrote Obamacare. They could write it better. Congress wants all of us to do our part. Surely business too?

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Based on this series of opioid conferences, my guess is their first step is to chop opioid prescribing down to 100 mg morphine equivalents. But what about untreated pain at the heart of the epidemic of suicide? I see it among all classes of people, because we’ve focused on opioids too long to the exclusion of research and exclusion of a whole world of medications now generic, no longer on patent therefore inexpensive, FDA approved medications. The biggest shock: Valuable compounded medications are no longer on formularies of insurers! Our most affordable FDA approved medicines are no longer covered by insurance.

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Where is the data that we must limit the dose to 100 mg per day morphine equivalent?

Is it too much pain medicine or is it untreated pain?

Is it lack of medical care?

or is it lack of affordable medical care?

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My comments arise from grave concern the Insurers and FDA are overlooking the needs of my pain patients. I must speak up now despite need to recover in the next few days.

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Where is the concern for the pain patient

in this multimillion dollar pharmaceutical-company-funded opioid conference?

FDA mandated that manufacturers of extended release opioids fund the conferences.

Where are the millions that need to be spent on

rational interdisciplinary pain management,

rather than just opioid management?

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We need more than just studies of suicides and opioid changes.

We need hospitals and insurance systems

to recognize legitimate therapies that work for real people.

Would the epidemic of addiction

go down if people could get treatment for their pain?

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I posted this week on a new study, an epidemic of suicide in Caucasian middle aged Americans. The results were a shock to Case and Deacon, the Princeton Economists who did the research that merited two articles in the New York Times.

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Epidemic of suicide

deaths as high as in the AIDS epidemic,

driven by pain, disability, loss of job, drug abuse, other.

By too many opioids or by untreated pain?

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That is why, a few days ago I posted on that epic study by Princeton economists: the suicides in middle aged Caucasians now comparable to deaths during the AIDS epidemic. I posted how that can change. In that article and for years with this blog, I post about medications that work more effectively than opioids, i.e. glial modulators, and the need for compounded and herbal medications from approved highly reputable small local pharmacies need to be covered by insurers and allowed on hospital formularies.

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Epidemic of suicide – could it be due to lack of pain treatment

not due to an epidemic of opioids?

Is it too much pain medicine or is it untreated pain?

Is it lack of medical care?

Or is it lack of affordable medical care?

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The key figure from the Case-Deaton study on epidemic of suicides in white middle-aged Americans –  bigger than deaths at the height of the AIDS epidemic. The question is why?

Andrew Gelman, statistician at Columbia University and writer for the Washington Post, argues in his blog against the rate being higher at all. His conclusion: “…death rates among middle-aged non-Hispanic whites in the U.S. slightly increased, even while corresponding death rates in other countries declined by about 30%.”

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Regardless of the argument, untreated pain is a big problem. It causes suffering and joblessness, and can lead to addiction and suicide.

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Does it matter which side of the argument is right?

Pain management is being taught in only 3% of American medical schools.

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Where is the data that we must limit the dose to 100 mg per day morphine equivalent?

Is it too much pain medicine or is it untreated pain?

Is it lack of medical care?

Or is it lack of affordable medical care?

Insurers are not willing to pay for larger doses of opioids

and deny prior authorization.

Does this lead to suicide?

Money is the root of some of this.

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The cure for suicide is not just to take a sword and slice off the top doses of morphine, and treat everyone with the same low doses, whether you have herniated discs or sprained ankle or RSD.  Sprained ankles may be already getting too much.

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Why blame it all on over-prescribing? How about suicide due to under-prescribing, or suicide from not treating pain at all because healthcare insurance and unemployment don’t mix?   

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Are they blaming high doses as cause of suicide? How about when high dose opioids fail, when all drugs fail, we see no new drugs on the horizon for pain control. That does not fill those patients with hope.

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Of course it is important to acknowledge, as the New York Time health section has followed that epidemic research with How Doctors Helped Drive the Addiction Crisis.

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Where is the data that we must limit the dose to 100 mg per day morphine equivalent?

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Someone must advocate for change. It’s not just pills, it’s not just opioids.

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We are all at risk from disabling pain, loss of jobs and suicide

—yes, doctors too become disabled—

because of substandard education in pain management in this country

focused almost universally

on opioid treatment of pain.

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Lack of funding killed the university interdisciplinary pain management centers in 1991

 

AND we need access to compounded drugs, herbs & supplements in our hospitals.

If Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center can do it, why can’t my hospital?  

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Expect 100 mg oral morphine or equivalent maximum dose per day to rapidly become the standard nationwide. Insurers are refusing to cover the cost of higher doses. Even if you can afford $17,000 out of pocket each month for pain relief, your doctor will be shouldering liability if outside these rapidly evolving guidelines. Insurers rule – and they deny coverage of inexpensive compounded drugs that work better than opioids for my patients who have failed all known treatment. That’s why we need better education and more clinically focused research.

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Those who blame Obamacare for high insurance costs and business-wide practices need look no further than the price of medications, especially opioids.

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It seems everyone breezes over where Washington State came up with a maximum of 100 mg morphine (or equivalent) as a maximum daily dose of opioid. 

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This 100 mg maximum daily morphine dose became law in Washington State many years ago, initially for Workers Compensation, and will soon be adopted by Oregon.

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Of course we are all concerned about the shocking rise in deaths from prescription opioids that are occurring since opioids began to be used after Russell Portnoy published its use for chronic pain in 1991. We just didn’t know that they work for cancer pain that is usually acute pain, not for what is now tens of millions with chronic pain who are on opioids

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But opioids are still necessary for some. Those of my patients who take opioids will have a very hard time with the 100 mg morphine (or equivalent) maximum daily guideline. Informed consent is out the window. We all recognize the practice of medicine has been done by insurance companies since the late 1980’s when managed care took over. This will not change. Now insurers require the ICD10 diagnosis code before they will allow the pharmacist to refill an antidepressant that the patient has been taking for one year with much needed relief. This will give them more tools to deny paying.

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It would appear that those who govern our medication use (insurers and DEA) — and who deny coverage of even more useful, inexpensive medication –  feel that 100 mg morphine equivalent is the maximum dose that should be prescribed.   

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100 mg oral morphine is equivalent to:

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66 mg Oxycodone

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25 mg/hr Fentanyl Patch

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25 mg hydromophone (Dilaudid)

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120 mg hydrocodone (12 of the Vicodin, Norco, Lorcet 10 mg tablets)

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30 mg Oxymorphone (Opana) use not recommended

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Morphine               to                Methadone      

30-90 mg                                   One fourth the morphine dose

90-300 mg                                 One eighth (200 mg/day morphine = 25 mg methadone)

300-500 mg                               One twelfth the morphine dose

>500 mg                                    One twentieth the morphine dose

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Methadone conversion is far more complex than this guideline from University of Michigan

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Only 3% of medical schools teach pain management. That ignorance is costing us trillions in insurance and pharmaceutical fees, and right now the latter two are making war on each other by taking it out on you, the patient who is getting substandard care. They’re taking care of their financial needs that show us the symptoms of disease, pain, suffering, disability, loss of job, and the just published this week, the epidemic of suicide. We need to treat the cause, not just the symptoms. Medical education, injury prevention and treatment needs to be taught starting K-12. The cost would pay for itself but the Insurance Industry needs to pay for it there and in University Medical Schools because Congress will not pay for it. It would be a cost saving investment that would pay itself off in care for seniors when grandchildren have to spot mom and dad in the 24 hour, extended family care that strains budgets. We cannot afford not to teach trigger point basics to each kid and each physical therapist and MD. That alone could save tons of opioids and monthly visits for what never works for muscle strain that no one has found.

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I’m tired of seeing how degraded it has become. To fail to treat the cause of disability and suffering is far more in our hands now, it could happen if people were taught basics instead of opioids, K through medical school. Are we teaching only opioids? yes, it seems so. I am advocating for everything I have written about in this blog since 2009. Glial modulators, mechanical approaches, but compounded medications, in particular, are sadly becoming unaffordable because insurers have stopped coverage for them. Then we all lose one of the most important tools, the only tool, that my patients and millions of others have in treating intractable pain or treatment resistant Major Depressive Disorder, Bipolar Depression. Compounded medications often work after everything else has failed. The lives of my patients have usually either returned back to normal or  improved in ability to function. That has never been shown with opioids for chronic pain.

 

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I’m too exhausted to be in a position to edit what I’ve written just now, or write adequately. I am just furious at the direction our country for decades has pushed into opioid treatment rather than pain management. This has reached peak brewing since the DEA conference yesterday, dictated by the FDA funded by opioid manufacturers.

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It is a hope that Insurers could fund an analysis of the billions that could be saved and suicides prevented if they funded pain management. What is there to live for than a life free of pain and disability?

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The analysis could show how much is saved when training begins with the young, how to prevent and treat injury. How helpful a child can be to aging grandparents or parents when illness strikes the family. We always turn to family first, as we should. Why is something of the field of pain management not taught in K-12?

 

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The FDA just authorized two opioids for children this last week. I have a vague memory one was oxycontin in children. I do not argue against opioids, I have given opioids to tiny children when I worked in hospice. Children have crippling arthritis too and other medical needs for opioids.

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I am not arguing against opioids. I am saying that what is taught is zero pain management. The focus on drugs is completely unbalanced.

 

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If Sloan Kettering can teach herbal and supplementary medicine to cancer patients, why not begin the study of herbal medicine at K-12 since a lot of parents are taking it instead of using common sense such as exercise, weight loss, family time, relaxation. And herbal and supplementary medicine is what these young ones will teach their children when they grow up. Hopefully prevent some of the toxicity from swallowing all sorts of useless and dangerous things on the shelves.

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Rational health care must begin young in the schools. .

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