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Of the 2916 people who died in Massachusetts between 2013-2015 (and had complete toxicology reports): 1789 (61%) had heroin detected. 1322 (45%) had fentanyl detected. Only 39 (1.3%) of the decedents who had a prescription opioid detected in their body had an active (legal) prescription for that opioid on the day they died. In other words, 98.7% of the people who died and had a prescription drug in their body obtained that drug illegally (not by prescription). This confirms that it is (and has been) the abuse, not the use of opioids that is killing people. Properly managed pain patients...

Even as rates of opioid prescribing dropped by 25% between 2011 and 2017, opioid overdose deaths continued to rise. It is time for Congress to direct the CDC to withdraw its guideline for a ground-up rewrite by an agency like the NIH or FDA that actually knows what it is doing. Likewise, the Veterans Health Administration must be directed to withdraw its closely related “Opioid Safety Initiative.” Veterans tell me that medical practice standards embedded in the initiative are driving vets to suicide by denying them treatment with opioid pain relievers. Finally, the DEA must be told to stand down...

A Missouri woman has been charged with stealing her terminally ill daughter’s pain medications. Medical staff found bed sores on the daughter and began suspecting the daughter wasn’t being given the prescribed doses of fentanyl and oxycodone, so they tested her urine. Police say it showed no signs of the medications..... … Bond is set at $100,000. No attorney is listed for Ballweg in online court records.

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — Got a few aches and pains? Before you head to the medicine cabinet and reach for those over-the-counter painkillers, consider drinking a few beers. A new study, led by Dr. Trevor Thompson from the University of Greenwich, and published in The Journal of Pain, suggests that throwing back a few cold ones actually relieves your pain better than Tylenol. The study, reported by Lifehacker, found that raising your blood alcohol content to the legal limit of .08%, or about three or four beers deep, elevates your pain threshold significantly. The research involved 18 studies and more than...

Craig Schroeder was injured in 2006 while serving with the Marines in Iraq and suffers from traumatic brain injury and pain, for which he has been on a steady regimen of opioids. WASHINGTON — New federal rules that make it harder to get narcotic painkillers are taking an unexpected toll on thousands of veterans who depend on these prescription drugs to treat everything from missing limbs to post-traumatic stress. The restrictions, adopted last summer by the Drug Enforcement Administration to curb a national epidemic of opioid abuse, are for the first time, in effect, forcing veterans to return to the...

Under the rules that took effect in May, hospice patients or their families could not fill prescriptions through their Part D drug plans until first confirming that the prescriptions were not covered by hospice providers. Drugs related to palliative and comfort care are supposed to be covered under the fixed rate payments to the hospice. Medicare announced Friday that the rules would be revised so that the additional authorization would be required for only four types of medications: pain relievers, anti-nauseants, laxatives, and anti-anxiety drugs that are “nearly always” considered hospice-related.

For many in the West pain ends with a pill, but elsewhere the war on drugs is cutting people off from pain medication. For much of the Western world, physical pain ends with a simple pill. Yet more than half the world's countries have little to no access to morphine, the gold standard for treating medical pain. Freedom from Pain shines a light on this under-reported story. "For a victim of police torture, they will usually sign a confession and the torture stops," says Diederik Lohman of Human Rights Watch in the film. "For someone who has cancer pain, that...

So where have you bought and how? How do you manage it? I somehow cannot wrap my mind around it. Thanks

Even short-term use of some painkillers could be dangerous for people who've had a heart attack, according to research published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association. Researchers analyzed the duration of prescription non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) treatment and cardiovascular risk in a nationwide Danish cohort of patients with prior heart attack. They found the use of NSAIDs was associated with a 45 percent increased risk of death or recurrent heart attack within as little as one week of treatment, and a 55 percent increased risk if treatment extended to three months. The study was limited by its observational...

Federal search warrants released Friday accuse Dr. Antoine Johnson of selling prescriptions for cash, filing false bills for medical service and submitting fraudulent tax returns. The warrants cite several medical audits and undercover visits as well as doctor, patient and employee interviews listing issues with missing records, inflated billing or prescription drug refills without proper medical evaluation. “One patient told (an employee) that Dr. Johnson’s clinic is known as a ‘drug mill’ and ‘pill farm’ in the community,” a warrant stated. “... (The employee) believed that some patients went to more than one of Dr. Johnson’s clinics on the same...