Good dig and find yankee, as usual, the research Maestro strikes again!
I'm familiar with Millenium - don't forget they are in the LUT (Lab P-test) space, but the study shows some good pain statistics and slams the opioids.
I liked slides 5 and 9 in the deck.
Slide 11 is more indication of how physicians have been wrongly slammed as scapegoats for the issues of analgesic abuse in the U.S. Sure, there are physicians who too quickly prescribe, or repeat Rx's, to keep up patient flow through their offices and income, and many who over-prescribe instead of listening, thinking and administering proper care, I don't deny those, but look at the numbers you found. Only 18.5% of the Non-medical analgesic use originates with physicians. If you add up the 3 categories of free, bought and stolen without asking, from a friend or relative, they total 72.6% of the non-medical use. And, why I've been saying for years, "We're doing it to ourselves!" We are careless with analgesics and we, the people, are taking advantage of a broken system to enable our pill-popping like candy!
Slide 18 tells the public/Rx opioid cost story well; if it ever got out through mainstream media to the masses, the scandal and political fallout would be huge, but I doubt it will:
It proves what a number of us have been preaching. The medical services to opioid Rx expense ratio is $41:1, which is why I mentioned hospitals and insurers earlier this morning. It's the public that is paying for the abuse through sadly unnecessary and therefor inappropriate use of every medical service you can think of! So, it's friends and relatives causing or enabling the tragedy, that's us, and it's us paying for it.
Slide 21, the areas of solutions is colorful, starts to sell P-tests for Millenium, no mention of devices or tough love. It's all good to sell urine tests but they only confirm what we already know - that the person receiving the opioid Rx is taking them, or the patient under suspicion for painkiller abuse has either got them free, bought and stolen without asking, from a friend or relative, in 72.6% of the cases!!!
Look at slide 22 in the deck for the annual direct cost of treating one patient with chronic pain yankee. Now, compare the cost of drugging that person all year with the cost of ActiPatch and, let's see, 25% of the current drug cost? Who knows what the correct new opioid consumption number is, it's lower and may become zero. Whatever, we know lower drug consumption is less harmful to society, which is why it takes so long to change from bad habits to good ones cause until we change our habits, it's easy to pop pills sold on TV by attractive people despite half or more of the promo talking about side-effects.
We don't do so well at looking after ourselves yankee, until it becomes a cultural shift by society in general = a paradigm shift in the scientific treatment of pain, to simply enhance the wellness of a population using a proven disruptive technology. Let's go FDA, it's time to help America, the largest painkiller consumer in the world, at over 80% of all Rx and OTC products and from Pennsylvania Avenue through every part of our nation, we're doing it to ourselves and boy, are we paying for it, in death and taxes! Imagine if the American people knew the truth!
