Corrupt medical institutions, opioid edition
Think the opioid crisis was just an accident of history? Think again.
The AMA is completely trustworthy. You can trust that they will advocate for Big Pharma regardless of the cost to patients. Do no harm...to Big Pharma profits.
https://www.racket.news/p/how-the-opiate-conspiracy-widened?r=aiop6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web"Doctors and nurses are expected to keep up with medical science.
...
I read the monthly
Emergency Medicine News, and I participate in hospital-based online and in-person trainings.
Some of this I do in a spirit of self-improvement. But I also need continuing medical education credits CMEs to stay licensed. How many credits, and on what topics, varies by medical specialty and from state to state. (The Federation of State Medical Boards has a summary page
here.)
...
Everyone needs CME. We keep an eye out for it, and welcome it when it's from a respectable source. So, if the American Medical Association the epitome of button-down respectability has a CME program, that's got to be worth a listen, right?
Well, maybe not:
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CME programs sponsored by the AMA about pain management were prepared by Purdue Pharma-paid physicians in 2003, 2007, 2010 and 2013. For much of this time, the OxyContin-maker was also
lavishing millions of dollars upon the AMA and its associated AMA Foundation, while Purdue's President Richard Sackler
was sitting on the AMA Foundation's board of directors. Even as late as 2016, Purdue was still one of only two "Platinum Level" donors to the AMA Foundation.
...
Key context: Most of this is happening years and years
after Purdue had already
pled guilty (in 2007) to fraud and
intentional deception aimed at creating a world of recklessly liberal opioid prescribing. Purdue admitted it did that, cut the government a check for about 5 percent, and then, as we will see, doubled down on
even more egregious fraud and deception some of that rolled out in these AMA courses.
What was the AMA, courtesy of opioid-funded marketing medical education, teaching us? Advil and Motrin are dangerous; opioids are safe.
...
Yet opioid manufacturers
also wrote most of this FSMB booklet. (
The Wall Street Journal reports Purdue's Dr. David Haddox was particularly active.) Companies including
Cephalon,
Endo and Purdue then paid the FSMB more than $250,000 to distribute 163,000 copies to physicians. For context, there are
about 1 million licensed physicians nationwide so that's one booklet for every six physicians.
In fact, the FSMB was showered with more than $2 million in opioid cash over the next few years, while opioid manufacturer sales reps marched door to door, hand-delivering these booklets to doctors and nurse practitioners at primary care offices. The Mississippi lawsuit notes (
paragraph 163, pg. 60) this was a powerful signal:
Quote:
Drug companies relied on FSMB guidelines to convey the message that "undertreatment of pain" would result in official discipline … doctors, who used to believe that they would be disciplined if their patients became addicted to opioids, were [now being] taught that they would be punished instead if they failed to prescribe opioids.
Opioid manufacturers found
Responsible Opioid Prescribing so business-friendly that they had their sales reps bring it to thousands of pharmacists, too. The New York attorney general's lawsuit (
paragraph 554, pg. 150) says the booklet:
Quote:
taught that behaviors such as "requesting drugs by name," "demanding or manipulative behavior," seeing more than one doctor to obtain opioids, and hoarding, were not signs of addiction but were all really signs of "pseudoaddiction."
