Author: The Fix

The 1975’s Frontman Matty Healy: I Thought I Was A "Good Drug Addict"

The now-clean frontman of the band The 1975 reveals he was struggling with heroin addiction last year.

Matty Healy, frontman of rock band The 1975, revealed in an interview with Billboard that he was under the influence of drugs for a large portion of 2017 but has since cleaned up his act.

He first realized he may have a problem when he embarked on a benzodiazepine-fueled ego trip, ranting at his bandmates after they discovered he was smoking heroin again.

“Listen, everyone has to get onboard because I’m the f—ing main deal,” Healy recalled telling his fellow band members, who have known him since they were in high school. “If you want the songs, we’re just going to have to get on with it.”

He told them he planned to detox after they start recording their third album. But the next morning, he had regrets over the way he acted towards them.

“I realized that was absolutely f—ing bulls—,” he told Billboard. Finding his bandmate George [Daniel], Healy told him “I should go to rehab.”

Healy went to a Barbados rehab in November and stayed for seven weeks. While he is now clean of heroin, he recalls a time when he would be able to dump the habit for weeks at a time only to relapse when he was off on his own. Healy thought he was a “good drug addict,” but realized that the addiction could very easily cost him everything.

“People had started to lose respect for me, but not an irredeemable amount,” he said.

To hold himself accountable, he’s promised to take a drug test every week in front of his bandmates.

Healy reflects on his struggles with heroin in the song “It’s Not Living If It’s Not With You” on the band’s upcoming album, A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, and it’s definitely not a song meant to romanticize drugs.

“I don’t want to fetishize it, because it’s really dull and it’s really dangerous,” he told Billboard. “The thought of being to a young person what people like [William S.] Burroughs were to me when I was a teenager makes me feel ill. … I still risked it.”

Since getting clean of heroin, he’s also realized that he’s wasted time chasing things he thought would make him happy, but this pursuit does nothing for your own self-esteem.

“I thought it would be like, ‘Ooh, a bit of gold, a Rolls-Royce’ — I never had a Rolls-Royce — ‘drugs with a pop star, shag that pop star’ — I didn’t shag any pop stars — all of the trappings of a music video,” he reflected. “And what you realize is the pursuit of happiness is this Sisyphean thing for most people. Thinking that the goal is to be happy is a bit mad. It’s more about fleeting moments of joy and knowing that life is hard.”

While he is clean of heroin, Healy still chooses to smoke marijuana.

View the original article at thefix.com

6 August 2018
Do Free Meals From Pharma Reps Affect Doctors' Prescribing Habits?

A new paper examined prescribing numbers and marketing efforts by two pharmaceutical companies to determine if free meals made an impact.

Cardiologists who were taken out for a meal by sales representatives from two major drug manufacturers were 73% more likely to prescribe medication from those companies, even if equivalent, lower-costing generic drugs were available.

Those are the findings suggested by a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), which also alleged that while an increase in prescribing certain drugs can be a positive for patients that use them, it can also take a toll on consumers by pushing more expensive drugs over cheaper alternatives; the paper’s authors estimated that the total cost was $190 million.

The paper also suggested that such marketing techniques for doctors should be eliminated altogether, as several states and health care systems have already done.

The paper looked at prescribing numbers and marketing efforts by two pharmaceutical companies, Pfizer and AstraZeneca—which make the cholesterol-lowering drugs Lipitor and Crestor, respectively—between the years 2011 and 2012. Meal payments were made the focus because they were the most popular form of courting doctors, and made for the majority of non-research payments during that time period.

As MarketWatch reporter Emma Court noted, meal payments are, “by their very nature, designed to be ‘pure persuasion,’ as opposed to payments for consulting or speaking.”

Meal payments were valued at less than $150.

As for the nature of the discussion, the paper’s authors opined that it was “very likely that statins”—drugs used to reduce fat levels in blood—”were the focus of any drug-related discussions,” since Lipitor and Crestor comprised the majority of both companies’ sales to cardiologists.

The researchers found that when the two companies’ sales representatives paid for meals when meeting with cardiologists, those doctors were 73% more likely to prescribe Lipitor or Crestor to their patients. It did not appear to matter what sort of meal it was; as the report’s authors noted, “it appears that the effect is driven by the receipt of any meal, regardless of its value.”

The information disseminated by the companies’ sales representatives also did not impact the doctors’ decisions; as Court wrote, both drugs had been available for nearly a decade (15 years, in the case of Lipitor), which meant that new information about either medication was unlikely to be provided at these lunch meetings, and lower-priced generic equivalents for both drugs were widely available.

Plying medical professionals with gifts, which ranged from simple meals to lucrative speaking engagements and consulting work, has been a regular sales and marketing practice for pharmaceutical companies.

But with studies like the NBER report suggesting that prescription rates rise and clinical treatment can be influenced after such treatment—which in turn can have a negative impact on health care costs and patient health—health industry observers and policymakers have turned to legislation that requires pharmaceutical companies to report all payments made to doctors, or ban such gestures altogether.

View the original article at thefix.com

4 August 2018
Dr. Drew and Dave Discuss Overdose Death of "Dopey Podcast" Host

Chris from Dopey Podcast had been clean for almost five years before his fatal relapse.

Dopey Podcast co-host, Chris, 33, passed away from an overdose on July 24.

The Fix spoke with Dave, his friend and Dopey co-host, about the sudden loss. The two met eight years ago at Chris’s 14th rehab. They stayed in touch and became close friends.

Chris had a year and a half sober and Dave was three months sober when they started the Dopey Podcast.

“I loved Chris and I will always miss him,” Dave told The Fix, his voice cracking with emotion. Dave is unsure of the exact date that Chris’s relapse began.

Board-certified internist and addiction specialist “Dr. Drew” Pinsky is a big fan of Dopey. Back in March, he sat down with the guys to discuss addiction, rehab and romance for their 124th episode.

The Fix spoke with Dr. Drew about Dopey after his appearance on the show. “If you’re an addict,” he said, “and you listen to Dopey, you will find your people, and your story here. Listen to it and you’ll see what I mean.”

During the episode, it was revealed that Pinsky had treated Chris years ago after one of his relapses. Dr. Drew joked with Chris about what a difficult case he’d been.

After finding out about Chris’s death, Pinsky offered his condolences to Dave, “Chris’s death is such a huge loss. His was a great success story—especially after so many years of chronic relapses. This is a real tragedy.”

“Chris loved being sober and he loved Dopey,” Dave said. “He drove to New York every week—10 to 12 hours roundtrip—just to record each episode of Dopey with me. But the last month he became really unreliable.”

Annie Giron, Chris’s girlfriend, told The Fix that she was the one who found his body in the bedroom of their Boston apartment. Giron has extensive training in the medical field of addiction.

“Chris had just finished his MA and was working towards a PhD in Clinical Psychology,” said Giron, fighting back tears. “I’m studying to be a psychiatrist. I know his death was not intentional. He was not suicidal at all. We were very much in love and excited about the future.”

“I’ve never been an addict and there are no addicts in my family but I have always been passionate about the field of addiction,” she said. “Over the years, I have administered Narcan to so many patients in the ER. I treated one patient 17 times and Narcan saved his life. That’s why the minute I saw Chris, I knew that he was dead. I tried to revive him with Narcan anyway even though I knew it was too late.”

Dave said, “Over the past month Chris had started acting really weird. I asked him what was going on. He blamed it on exhaustion. I believed him. He was really busy as a manager in a sober living facility and always studying.

Chris had a long history of drug abuse but had been clean for almost five years before his final relapse. Dave, Annie and friends were concerned that Chris was close to relapsing. Annie said he wasn’t depressed but had been anxious and agitated. He’d spent a week helping a patient and he may have confiscated medication.

“Chris tore a ligament in his leg that was extremely painful. He couldn’t sleep and I’d hear him moaning in agony. A doctor said it would take 4-6 months before Chris would feel any better. He needed to do physical therapy which the doctor warned would be painful. He hadn’t wanted to take painkillers but the injury was excruciating.”

Dave said he’d talked with Dr. Drew and Annie about how far Chris had come in his life and how shocked and heartbroken they are at this unexpected loss.

Dr. Drew’s next Dopey episode will go live on Saturday, August 11. He and Dave will discuss addiction, recovery, and the frightening reality of America’s spike in fatal relapses.

View the original article at thefix.com

4 August 2018
Is Alcohol Consumption Among Women On The Rise?

A number of studies over the past few years have noted an eye-opening change in the drinking habits of women.

It was an incident in which she put her daughter in danger that made Laura McKowen of North Shore, Massachusetts realize she needed to stop drinking.

“I put her in danger at the wedding. I left her unattended for a long period of time. She was 4,” McKowen told WebMD. “I knew eventually, I would lose custody of my daughter if I kept drinking. It was inevitable. I knew I would lose pretty much everything.”

And McKowen isn’t alone. Research from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) shows that alcohol use disorder in women in the U.S. doubled from 2002 to 2013.

Today, McKowen is a prominent voice in the recovery sphere and has nearly 30,000 followers on Instagram, where she often posts about life in recovery as a mother. She uses her story to reach out to women who may be part of the rising number battling alcohol.

According to WebMD, historically, males have been heavier and more frequent drinkers than women. However, new research from a number of organizations is pointing to a changing trend.

For example, high-risk drinking (3 or more drinks in one day or 7 or more in one week for women) grew about 58% from 2001-2002 to 2012-2013.

Another study, from 2018, found that from 2014 to 2016, alcohol-related ER visits increased more steeply for women than men. Female fatalities as a result of liver cirrhosis also increased from 2000 to 2013.

In addition to drinking more, studies have also found that women are starting to drink earlier, WebMD notes.

A 2017 study from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) discovered that gender gaps in drinking as early as high school and middle school were narrowing, whereas males used to far outweigh females when it came to starting drinking early.

“Now, by eighth grade, more females than males are drinking. Females are now, for the first time in history, more likely to drink in 10th grade than males; and by 12th grade, where there used to be a big gap 10 or 15 years ago, it’s now dead even,” Aaron White, PhD, senior scientific advisor to the director of the NIAAA.

One aspect of higher female drinking rates that is especially concerning is that females are more prone to certain drinking-related health issues, like liver inflammation, cardiovascular disease, neurotoxicity, and cancer, according to Deidra Roach, MD, medical project officer of the NIAAA Division of Treatment and Recovery Research. She adds that women are also more likely to experience blackouts.

“This is a very serious issue for women,” she says. “We need to do more in terms of getting this message out to young women and medical providers who work with young people. Because once you end up on the slippery slope of harmful drinking, it becomes difficult to reverse.”

According to WebMd, the reasons for the increase could have to do with a change in cultural norms, as well as an increase in depression and anxiety and possibly violence towards women.

As the issue continues to grow, McKowen plans to continue using her voice to let others know that sobriety is not the end.

“I thought sobriety was going to be a terrible death sentence, and it is by far the best thing that has ever happened in my life,” she told WebMD. “Now I have honest relationships. I am a far better mother, and I am doing work I actually love because I had the presence of mind to move to that. I am just living a more honest, joyful, and free life.”

View the original article at thefix.com

3 August 2018
Drinking While Breastfeeding Study Gets Pushback From Critics

One critic says the study “is so deeply misleading and irresponsible that it falls only a wood shaving short of Pinocchio’s nose.”

A study released this week suggests that drinking alcohol while breastfeeding can contribute to temporary cognitive delays in children, but critics say that the study is flawed and overreaching.

The study, published in the journal Pediatrics, looked at data from about 5,000 Australian children. It found that children who were breastfed and whose mothers drank while they were breastfeeding, had lower cognitive abilities at ages 6 and 7, although the difference disappeared by ages 10 and 11.

“Exposing infants to alcohol through breastmilk may cause dose-dependent reductions in their cognitive abilities,” researchers concluded. “Although the relationship is small, it may be clinically significant when mothers consume alcohol regularly or binge drink.”

The study did not examine when these mothers were drinking—whether it was during a time when more alcohol was likely to be transferred to their child via breast milk, or not.

However, some healthcare providers said that the small but significant finding should cause people to take a second look at the risk of drinking while breastfeeding, which have so far been found to be minimal.

“Previous recommendations that reveal limited alcohol consumption to be compatible with breastfeeding during critical periods of development, such as the first months of life, may need to be reconsidered in light of this combined evidence,” Dr. Lauren M. Jansson, director of pediatrics at the Center for Addiction and Pregnancy and an associate professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, wrote in a commentary published with the study.

Dr. Melissa Bartick, an assistant professor of medicine at Cambridge Health Alliance and Harvard Medical School, told CNN that the safest option is for nursing mothers to forego all alcohol. However, there is not much concrete information on the safety—or lack thereof—of drinking and nursing.

“I think the study is helpful, but it doesn’t definitely answer the question. The question is, how much, if any, alcohol is safe during lactation?” Bartick said. “I would advise mothers to avoid alcohol and not to use alcohol, not to use beer to try to increase their milk supply. I think that’s safe to advise.”

Writing for Forbes, healthcare reporter Tara Haelle says the study “is so deeply misleading and irresponsible that it falls only a wood shaving short of Pinocchio’s nose.”

She also pointed out that the study had many flaws.

“Here’s what the new Pediatrics study actually found: Children who have ever been breastfed and whose mothers have ‘risky drinking habits’ in general are more likely to have slightly lower cognitive scores on one reasoning test at 6-7 years old,” she wrote. “But their scores aren’t any different on a vocabulary or an early literacy/math skills test, and there’s no difference in their scores at all when they’re 10-11 years old.”

View the original article at thefix.com

3 August 2018
Nurse Pleads Guilty To Stealing Fentanyl from Hospital

According to police, the nurse admitted that she had initially stolen the fentanyl for her husband before she started using it herself.

A North Carolina nurse has admitted that she stole fentanyl from the hospital where she worked, first for her husband and later for personal use.

Hayley Lammon Brown, 29, was working at Forsyth Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina when the theft occurred, according to The Winston-Salem Journal.

This week, Brown entered a guilty plea in Forsyth Superior Court to one count of embezzlement of a controlled substance by an employee, and was given a suspended sentence of eight to 19 months and placed on three years of supervised probation. She was also charged with assault of a police officer after an officer was exposed to the drug, and she is appealing her guilty plea in that case.

During sentencing, Judge Ed Wilson said that Brown needs to get treatment, although it was not court-ordered. “You’re either going to spend the rest of your life in prison or you’re going to die if you don’t do something about this,” he said.

Authorities first came into contact with Brown in April 2017 when they responded to an overdose at Brown’s home. At the time she told police that her husband had bought the medication online.

However, officers found two vials of hospital-grade fentanyl at the home. At that point, the local police department asked for assistance from the FBI.

John Keane, special agent in charge with the State Bureau of Investigation, interviewed Brown, and she admitted that she had been stealing fentanyl from the hospital beginning in 2016. She said that she first took the drugs for her husband, before she started using them herself.

When the hospital learned of Brown’s alleged theft, it did a three-month audit of her use of medications and found discrepancies in how she handled fentanyl. The hospital fired her and the North Carolina Board of Nursing suspended her nursing license. Brown later voluntarily gave up her license for a year, but after that she will be eligible to have her license reinstated.

Although fentanyl is at the center of the opioid epidemic and has become a popular street drug, it does have legitimate medical use.

However, because of its potential for abuse it is carefully regulated in hospitals. Novant Health, which owns the hospital where Brown worked, has policies in place to avoid abuse, the company said.

“Novant Health has detailed policies that demand strict adherence to all federal, state and local regulatory requirements as well as the organization’s ethical standards and policies,” the health care network said in a written statement.

“We take very seriously any allegation that the organization or any individual team member has not fully complied with or in some way violated regulatory requirements, including the mishandling of controlled substances.”

View the original article at thefix.com

3 August 2018
No More Psychotropic Drugs For Migrant Kids Without Consent, US Judge Rules

Several migrant children have given disturbing testimony about being forced to take psychotropic drugs at a facility in Texas.

The Trump administration must end the practice of unreservedly administering psychotropic medication to migrant children in US custody.

On Monday (July 30), US District Judge Dolly Gee in Los Angeles ordered the government to obtain consent or a court order before administering medication such as antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs, except in dire emergencies.

Several migrant children have given disturbing testimony of their treatment at Shiloh Residential Treatment Center in Manvel, Texas, one of many facilities contracted by the US Office of Refugee Resettlement to house immigrant children since 2013, the Washington Post reported.

One 12-year-old boy named Lucas R. from Guatemala, who was detained in February, was transferred to Shiloh after refusing to take Zoloft, a popular antidepressant, because it was causing him stomach pain, according to court filings.

Medical staff at the facility diagnosed the boy with major depressive disorder and informed him that he would continue to be held at Shiloh unless he was declared psychologically sound.

But the court documents contend that a large part of his depression had to do with “being kept from his family” who had arrived in the US before him, according to the Post.

Other testimony described the forceful administration of medication on children on multiple occasions. “I witnessed staff members forcefully give medication four times… Two staff members pinned down the girl… and a doctor gave her one or two injections,” said Isabella M., another child at Shiloh who was prescribed “multiple psychotropic medications” at the facility including topiramate, without her family’s consent.

“Nobody asked me for permission to give medications to my daughter, even though the staff at Shiloh has always had my telephone number and address,” Isabella’s mother testified.

Other children described being forcibly injected with drugs and being given pills “every morning and every night.”

Another child at Shiloh, Julio Z., said he “never knew exactly what the pills were.” Court documents list his drug regimen: Clonazepam (anti-anxiety), Divalproex (anti-convulsant), Duloxetine (anti-depressant), Guanfacine (ADHD medication), Latuda (anti-psychotic), Geodon (anti-psychotic), and Olanzapine (anti-psychotic).

“The staff threatened to throw me on the ground and force me to take the medication. I also saw staff throw another youth to the ground, pry his mouth open and force him to take the medicine,” Julio Z. testified. “They told me that if I did not take the medicine I could not leave, that the only way I could get out of Shiloh was if I took the pills.”

The Center for Investigative Reporting also found that a doctor at Shiloh had for nearly a decade prescribed psychotropic medication to children without board certification to treat children and adolescents.

View the original article at thefix.com

3 August 2018
The Joys of Being Wrong

I am limited when I am in my own power, convinced of its sufficiency.

I had initially thought to write this story – the story of a person once self-presumed irreparably broken who recently completed chemotherapy turned Ivy League law student in a sensible, stable long-distance relationship – once I had received official acceptance letters from myriad top-ranked schools and the boundless adoration of a future wife, an expression forged in platinum, maybe with a tasteful emerald or cushion cut. Submitting it now, though, amid this very particular brand of uncertainty so laden with the weight of proving my worth, after many rejections and healthily parting ways with my girlfriend, seems a far more fitting representation of the point of recovery.

What is that point?

The wording will vary for everyone, of course, but to me:

The point is not what you get: the point is what you do with it.

Were I to await the above, the increased likelihood of this lesson being misconstrued as “quit drugs, win big!” would overshadow the actual essence of sobriety. Sure, the cash and prizes sometimes include overwhelming esteem, material gain and skyrocketing popularity; more often than not, though, the promises of recovery entail something less expected – something that we wouldn’t at onset necessarily identify as exceeding our wildest dreams, but that somehow does. That’s one of the most amazing things about all of this, really – that what we think is humdrum is actually fulfilling, and that what we think will be fulfilling actually sells us short.

There’s a reconciliation of paradoxes implicit to the recovery process. When I heard of the addict mentality described as “negative ego” I didn’t fully grasp its implications until I heard the same rephrased by a young woman who said that, in her active addiction, she felt like a “piece of shit in the center of [her] own universe.” Later I heard such peculiar self-evaluation termed as “arrogant doormat” and “I didn’t think much of myself, but I was all that I thought about.”

When I first got clean, the catalyst beyond threat of discontinued financial support was certainty that I would finally be recognized for the meteoric talent that I was – that all of the reasons for which I thought I used substances would be reinterpreted and rightly understood as unappreciated genius and, once so affirmed, I would no longer indulge that self-destructive tendency born of being “misunderstood” – no wait sorry – not just misunderstood like you are – distinctively misunderstood. Quitting drugs for me, however, has actually shown its primary benefit to be that I now get to participate in life just as other people do – like a person looking to what actually is instead of constant consumption with what is not, with how they’ve been wronged, with how they are somehow simultaneously better and worse than ____, all at the same time.

Even now, despite years of practiced right-sizing and spiritual dependence, there is a part of me that continues to sustain the myth that I am somehow so special as to be immune to the conditions that dog other people, despite a consistent undercurrent of fraudulence: that I can put in a little less effort, that I am somehow shrouded in a halo sufficient to enchant those so blessed to gaze upon my angel face.

We do not look at the world as if it were a mirror, reflecting only ourselves and whatever lies behind us: we look at the world as through a window; we see what is ahead but can’t help also catching our own reflection. Who we are, and what we think, informs what we see. That myth I maintain is delusional, so a part of who I am is delusional, and that part collects evidence to support that delusion’s accompanying grandeur. For as much as I develop my faculties of reason and reality, I think I might always retain a degree of magical thinking where I believe that maybe more is possible than may actually be possible. Sometimes I think that gives me the courage to take actions in faith and belief that might otherwise be precluded by too much logic, or not enough magic; while I can’t parse the precise extent to which that contributes to faith-based actions, it does seem to keep my chin parallel to ground and sky.

The other day someone asked me “How do you get from pain to faith?”

When I am in pain I am drawn closer to God. I do not balk at those who feel that pain instead causes division, or interpret pain as an absence of God: it is an absence, if you choose it to be. God is not the cause of pain; God is the solace that might be sought within it. It is almost as easy to blame God as it is to seek God; it is almost as easy to see differently as it is to see the same. When I am disappointed, it is not because God did not respond to my commands – God is not obligated to obey me; to the contrary it is I who is afforded the choice to obey God. All people have that agency – the ability to decide whether or not to honor and uphold that which is divinely informed, however “divinely informed” may be interpreted.

Whatever face you give to God, whatever name – that entity is with you. God is intended to comfort you in the impossible length of the dark night; God is intended to draw you closer.

What is closer? What does it feel like? Closer is the humoring of my will, the acknowledgment of its concerns and demands without automating action upon them. Closer is the awareness that maybe someone or some thing, either vaguely understandable or wholly intangible, may know better than I know. Closer is the nearly imperceptible sense of warmth you feel when you’re in great pain but know that this will not break you, that what you feel is not fully representative of your capability, because you are not just you – you are you plus that something greater; you are you and not alone.

___________________________________________

When I am charged with the full control and conduct of myself, as though my will and intention were affected within a vacuum, my ego enters stages left, right and center. When I surrender some bit of my will I am more closely actualized as who I am meant to be, rather than who I think I am meant to be, or who I project that I am. When I willingly enter into and actively sustain that relationship – severing ties to the notion that it has to be just me, that it means more if I do things on my own – then the way that I see the world, as it is and with my reflection, is limitless. I am limited when I am in my own power, convinced of its sufficiency. When I am in my own power, my options consist solely of those that I am capable of conceiving; when I am in God’s power, my options are as limitless as that to which I am intentioned.

I do not always agree with that to which I am intentioned. I recently received another “no” from an elite law school – another from one to which I was sure I’d be admitted – and have, in the past 10 minutes alone, assigned permanent and predictive weight to that decision. I have convinced myself that both my present and future fate are tethered to those rejections. I have projected that those rejections foreshadow a coordinated stonewalling effect that will prove ever prohibitive of every ambition that I have ever had, and as such I should just learn to teach spin, because that is probably how I will end up – alone, undereducated, and teaching spin – *not even at SoulCycle* (see what I did there?) – for the rest of my life.

When I fully inhabit my individualized agency I am downright apocalyptic. I allow no slit through which a ray of truth might shine; I do not suffer fools as I misunderstand soothsayers to be. At those times, I am in the most limited space I can occupy. And then, the break; then, the unexpected; then, that which I’d so quickly discounted, manifests.

View the original article at thefix.com

3 August 2018
Sober Cleveland Police Officer Gives Back To Local Recovery Community

After a lengthy battle with alcoholism, a Cleveland detective got sober and inspired those around him to change their lives.

Today, Cleveland police detective Chris Gibbons puts the bad guys in jail cells, but in 1992 he was on the other side of the law, sitting in a jail cell soaking wet and shivering after being brought in for public intoxication. After seven years of battling alcoholism, Gibbons had hit rock bottom.

“How did the son of a policeman end up here?” Gibbons said to News 5 Cleveland.

After that night, Gibbons was determined to turn his life around. He became a police officer just like his father and grandfather had been. And he inspired his sister, Erin Becker, to start her own path to sobriety.

“Most of my struggle was internal,” Becker said. “I just got to a point of hopelessness.”

Gibbons has been sober for 26 years and Becker has been in recovery for 17 years. Now, the siblings run a sober house together, helping women start their lives in recovery. Becker co-founded the Edna House, which has grown over the years, helping woman with limited means get sober.

“It started with three women. Now we have 40 women,” Becker said. “The women that come in, they see that the people that are here helping them, the staff, the woman that runs the program, we’re all in recovery. That catches their attention. Nothing is asked of them here. When they come to Edna and the only thing that is asked is, ‘Do you have a willingness to work on your own recovery?’ They know something is different.”

Gibbons is on the board of directors for Edna House and volunteers with men’s recovery programs though the area. He enjoys seeing the transformation of the 300 women who have graduated from Edna House.

“They’re almost unrecognizable when they’re done. They look so much better. They feel so much better,” Gibbons said. “You can actually see the happiness and the glow on their face whereas when they came in they were totally broken.”

In addition, Gibbons serves on the Cleveland Police Department’s Employee Assistance Unit, which helps officers navigate traumatic and stressful situations.

“It gives you a little credibility,” Gibbons said. “When I approach an officer or someone in the community who is struggling with it, I can say I’ve been there and I have a good life today because of my decision not to drink.”

Gibbons has prompted other law enforcement officials to become involved in the recovery community and sponsor events. Some of the people in recovery have even followed Gibbons’ footsteps and started a law enforcement career.

“Several dispatchers who actually went through this house are sober to this day because of their involvement here,” Becker said.

View the original article at thefix.com

3 August 2018
Pain Patients Turn To Controversial Injection After Cuts To Opioid Coverage

The anti-inflammatory drug has been banned in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Italy, New Zealand and Switzerland.

Back problems are the most common cause of chronic pain, and at the time when Medicare is cutting coverage for many opioid pain relievers, lawmakers are increasing Medicare coverage for a potentially dangerous off-label treatment for back pain.

Depo-Medrol is an injectable anti-inflammatory drug made by Pfizer. When it is injected into muscles and joints it can provide pain relief, but the drug is not supposed to be injected into or near the spinal chord. In fact, in 2013 Pfizer asked the Food and Drug Administration to ban back injections.

The FDA declined to issue the ban, despite the fact that Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Italy, New Zealand and Switzerland all issued bans, according to The New York Times.

“Serious neurologic events, some resulting in death, have been reported with epidural injection of corticosteroids,” Pfizer told the FDA. “Specific events reported include, but are not limited to, spinal cord infarction, paraplegia, quadriplegia, cortical blindness, and stroke.”

In June, legislators approved an increase in reimbursements for the Depo-Medrol shot.

At the same time, Medicare finalized a restrictive plan for covering opioids that will make it difficult for all but the most severe patients to access opioids long-term. This combination could make injectables a more appealing treatment, despite their risks.

“The victims of our era of aggressive opioid prescribing are being exploited in some cases by interventional pain doctors, who will continue them on opioids in exchange for allowing them to perform expensive procedures that they don’t need,” said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, co-director of opioid policy research at Brandeis University and executive director of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing. “These are not benign procedures. Patients can be harmed and are harmed.”

Despite this, use of Depo-Medrol and similar drugs increased 7.5% among Medicare patients between 2012 and 2016. Dr. James P. Rathmell, chairman of anesthesiology, perioperative and pain medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said that Medicare coverage policies have the potential to make the shots even more popular.

“The truth underlying it is that doing an injection is faster and results in higher reimbursements, compared to other ways of managing the same pain,” he said. “The use of injections has increased dramatically, yet the prevalence of back pain has remained relatively unchanged.”

Dr. Brian Yee, an anesthesiologist who practices in West Virginia, said that injections have the potential to be useful, but that they need to be handled carefully in order to ensure that they are being used responsibly.

“With people trying to take away opioids now, we are opening up another doorway for people to overutilize other options that can be helpful with the right doctors and the right patients,” he said.

View the original article at thefix.com

2 August 2018