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Tag: opioid restrictions

  • Pain Patients Push Back On Unfair Opioid Restrictions

    Pain Patients Push Back On Unfair Opioid Restrictions

    Pain patients hope to bring attention to the issue during Don’t Punish Pain rallies held around the nation this week. 

    April Grove Doyle just wanted to fill her prescriptions when she walked into a Rite Aid pharmacy. What she encountered, instead, was a hostile pharmacy worker who shamed her about using pain pills. 

    Doyle, who has Stage IV cancer, left in tears. 

    “I’ve got fucking cancer. I have terminal fucking cancer,” she said in a video that she posted about the experience. “They make me feel like I’m a felon or something. It’s not right.”

    Doyle is one of many pain patients around the United States who feel that opioid restrictions have gone too far. The pharmacist she interacted with that day told her he couldn’t fill her prescription because he was afraid of being fined.

    Pain patients say that these overly strict regulations on the distribution of pain pills erodes their quality of life and can ultimately drive them toward suicide. 

    “Pain patients have been abused,” Michael Schatman, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Pain Research told Wired. “I believe that it’s genocide of people with chronic pain.”

    Pain patients hope to bring attention to the issue during Don’t Punish Pain rallies held around the nation this week. 

    Doyle pointed out that she uses pain pills less frequently than her doctor recommends, making a one-month prescription last for 2-3 months. However, sometimes the pain from her terminal illness is too much to handle without opioids, she said. 

    “I don’t really take it unless I absolutely need it,” she said. “When you have metastatic cancer in your bones you need it, because sometimes the pain is so much you can’t even function. I just want to function. I want to be able to work. I want to be able to sleep. I want to be able to do things with my child. I don’t want to hurt all the time.”

    This isn’t the first time that Doyle has had trouble filling her pain prescriptions, even when she’s submitting them alongside other medications like chemotherapy pills and anti-nausea pills. 

    “Every time I take my pain prescription there they give me the run around. There’s always some stupid excuse,” she said. “I’m not a criminal. I’m not a drug addict. I don’t even take them as much as my doctor tells me to take them. It’s not fair.”

    Suicides among people with chronic pain have been rising, and many people blame the tightened regulations around opioids that have made it difficult for people to manage their pain effectively. 

    “You are allowing them to go home and essentially suffer until they kill themselves,” Lauren DeLuca, founder of the Chronic Illness Advocacy & Awareness Group, told The Fix last year. 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Chronic Pain Patients Feel The Effects Of Arizona Opioid Legislation

    Chronic Pain Patients Feel The Effects Of Arizona Opioid Legislation

    “They told me because of the new law they had to cut me back. It just hurts, I don’t want to walk, I don’t want to… pretty much don’t want to do anything,” said one pain patient.

    New bipartisan legislation curbing the pharmaceutical use of opioids in Arizona has been put into action. In January, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey signed the Arizona Opioid Epidemic Act, calling it “vital to combat an epidemic felt statewide and across the nation,” according to Reuters.

    However, some chronic pain patients in Arizona are already feeling harmful effects as the law is put into place. NPR reported that although the act was not written around the issues of chronic pain patients, it negatively impacts them, as doctors who are worried about legal trouble curb their patients’ access to the pain-relieving drugs.

    Governor Ducey’s administration had stated that the law would “maintain access for chronic pain sufferers and others who rely on these drugs.”

    This is mostly true: restrictions are written to apply to new patients only. Some were exempted, such as cancer and trauma patients, and patients in end-of-life care.

    However, in practice, some Arizona doctors are pulling back hard on prescribing opioids for all of their patients.

    Dr. Julian Grove, president of the Arizona Pain Society and contributor to the act told NPR that, “A lot of practitioners are reducing opioid medications, not from a clinical perspective, but more from a legal and regulatory perspective for fear of investigation. No practitioner wants to be the highest prescriber.”

    Shannon Hubbard, Arizona resident and chronic pain sufferer (she has a condition called complex regional pain syndrome) had her opioid pain relievers reduced by 10 mg in April. “They told me because of the new Arizona law they had to cut me back,” she told NPR, saying that her pain was now terrible. “It just hurts, I don’t want to walk, I don’t want to… pretty much don’t want to do anything.”

    The legislation created regulations around opioid use, citing that 75% of those addicted to heroin began their use with an opioid prescription. The act includes a limited initial opioid prescription of five days, and for certain extremely addictive painkillers, set a maximum 30-day prescription.

    The law includes $10 million to be spent treating people with opioid addiction who are not insured and ineligible for Medicaid. The “Good Samaritan” provision allows immunity for those reporting an overdose.

    Dr. Cara Christ, head of Arizona’s Department of Health Services and contributor to the state’s opioid response laws, told NPR, “The intent was never to stop prescribers from utilizing opioids. It’s really meant to prevent a future generation from developing opioid use disorder, while not impacting current chronic pain patients.”

    Still, Shannon Hubbard is living with the effects of the law, and not the intentions.

    “What they are doing is not working,” she told NPR. “They are having no effect on the guy who is on the street shooting heroin and is really in danger of overdosing. Instead they are hurting people that are actually helped by the drugs.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Drug Shortages Affect Hospitals Across US

    Drug Shortages Affect Hospitals Across US

    The national drug shortage has been severe enough for the FDA to allow Pfizer to sell products that normally would have been recalled.

    Emergency departments across the United States are feeling the strain of drug shortages that are affecting physicians’ ability to treat pain and other ailments.

    According to the New York Times, some hospitals, like Norwegian American Hospital in Chicago, have been “struggling for months” lacking crucial drugs like morphine, epinephrine (adrenaline) and diltiazem, a heart medication. Norwegian has not had morphine since March of this year, the Times reported.

    According to a May 2018 survey of 247 emergency doctors, conducted by the American College of Emergency Physicians, 9 in 10 said they did not have access to important medicines, which they said negatively affected nearly 4 in 10 patients.

    While the Times notes that while the reason behind the drug shortage is complex—including the fact that drug companies have little incentive to manufacture drugs that are difficult to make but “cheaply priced”—much of it has to do with manufacturing issues at Pfizer, which produces the majority of generic injectable drugs in the U.S.

    “Most of the time, the problem is some type of quality issue related to machine or raw materials,” said Erin Fox, senior director of the University of Utah’s drug information and support services, according to CBS News. “It could be contaminated particles, bacteria, metal shavings, glass particles—all kinds of things. There’s a real quality control problem.”

    Pfizer has received multiple warning letters from the Food and Drug Administration regarding issues of quality control, forcing it to slow down production while it addresses these issues. The company estimated that many of its drugs, like morphine, will not be available until 2019, according to the Times.

    Incredibly, the drug shortage has been severe enough for the FDA to allow “Pfizer to sell products that normally would have been recalled: In May, Pfizer released morphine and other drugs in cracked syringes, with instructions to health care providers to filter the drugs before injecting them,” the Times reported.

    Being the largest pharmaceutical company in the nation, Pfizer’s shortage issues have carried over to competitors who have struggled to fill the void.

    The lack of pain medications has been a “huge issue,” according to one emergency room doctor at Norwegian American Hospital. “[Patients] are often disappointed and frustrated that the system is not functioning at the level it should be.”

    Fox, who studies drug shortages, explained that the shortage of pain medications not only has to do with manufacturing issues, but opioid restrictions put in place by the government in response to the drug abuse epidemic.

    View the original article at thefix.com