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The Painkiller That Saves Money But Costs Lives
Hugh Pickens writes "Over 2,000 patients have died since 2003 in Washington State alone by accidentally overdosing on a commonly prescribed narcotic painkiller that costs less than a dollar a dose and the deaths are clustered predominately in places with lower incomes because Washington state has steered people with state-subsidized health care — Medicaid patients, injured workers and state employees — to methadone because the drug is cheap. Methadone belongs to a class of narcotic painkillers, called opioids, that includes OxyContin, fentanyl and morphine. Within that group, methadone accounts for less than 10 percent of the drugs prescribed — but more than half of the deaths and although Methadone works wonders for some patients, relieving chronic pain from throbbing backs to inflamed joints, the drug's unique properties make it unforgiving and sometimes lethal. 'Most painkillers, such as OxyContin, dissipate from the body within hours. Methadone can linger for days, pooling to a toxic reservoir that depresses the respiratory system,' write Michael J. Berens and Ken Armstrong. 'With little warning, patients fall asleep and don't wake up. Doctors call it the silent death.'"
because of the way it works, junkies don't prefer it. so who cares if a bunch of people die needlessly, at least it prevents people from getting high. the drug war matters more.
No perchance, and it was idiotic to even say, since you have easily looked it up and see that its protection was basically stripped from a defeated Germany in 1947. Wikipedia is your friend, laziness is not.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
As little as 100 years ago people were using perfectly legal opium compounds such as paregoric, with little or no social problems. The fact that people are dying and people are having their lives ruined by this failed "war on drugs" and the solutions are even worse than the problem just goes to show that government has no clue what it's doing.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I don't think I know anyone who takes pain drugs, so I have no personal knowledge. However, I found a short article about Methadone on the Seattle Times web site recently when I was looking at Google Health news. Even the summary seemed obviously suspicious, so I looked at the article.
..."
To me, that article and all the data to which the Slashdot story linked screamed incompetence or fraud. Now that I've read a little of the linked data, I realize the writers are at least partly incompetent. Possibly only whoever started them looking was engaged in fraud to sell more expensive drugs.
I just discovered that I'm not the only one who thinks that. Short quotes, read the full comments:
"It does not matter if you switch every body to oxycontin or oxycodone. These drugs are terrible at controlling pain and all are very dangerous."
"... I have an issue with how the Seattle Times is drawing a correlation between poverty and methadone poisoning.
Possibly Methadone is more often given to people who have little education, and who are therefore more likely to overdose because they didn't understand the instructions, or because they have other issues that confuse them.
Doctors don't generally like to prescribe pain killers. They worry about addiction, they worry about the DEA auditing their prescribing habits and yanking their license, without which it's kind of hard to be a doctor.
When they prescribe methadone, is it really out of cost, or have they grown so fearful of prescribing Oxycontin that somehow methadone seems like a reasonable alternative? And how many of those fears are medical/pharmacological, and how many are "if I prescribe Oxycontin I'll get in trouble" or "gee, there's a lot of press about Oxycontin, I shouldn't prescribe it"?
Overdose isn't when you take more then prescribed, it's when you take more then what your body can handle.
As such most overdoses are accidental.
From the article, it sounds like this is not a problem caused by cheap drugs but by piss-poor medical care. If a patient is given a specific form of Opioid which is known for stuff such as 'With little warning, patients fall asleep and don't wake up", and it does so frequently that they even gave this form of death the pet nickname, "silent death", then it does look like the only problem is that patients aren't monitored accordingly. To put it in other words, it does sound like they are putting the blame on a drug for a problem which is caused by incompetent medical staff which are routinely slacking off monitoring their patients and doing their rounds. Giving poor people sub-standard health care to the point of being considered neglect is a much more serious problem than providing cheap drugs.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
18 years ago I messed up my back, 8 years ago I did it again. The second time around didnt have the results of the first. I live with constant pain while awake unless laying down.
Pain is depressing, it ruins your attitude and life. I have learned to live with it, with pain pills to manage the pain. When sent to pain management every so often to get the pain medication adjusted methadone is always pushed, I am also low income. I have done a lot of study of pain drugs and will always tell the doctor that is one medication I want to avoid. At present I am on Percoset (oxycodone/acetaminophen). While it isnt as cheap as the methadone on my crappy insurance, my life is way more important than the $10 a month extra it costs me.
But the problem may not be the drug itself but the idea that some people in pain have that they can avoid pain completely. This isnt always the case when you are on these types of medication. You can control pain, you can moderate pain. But if you think that if I take a pill or two extra it will get rid of it altogether you are on a slippery slope. My brother tried that, he ended up taking more and more pills because over time your body starts resisting them. Thats where the danger lies. You take so many that you end up killing yourself by overdose, like my brother did at 36.
I trust Microsoft as far as I could comfortably spit a dead rat
Ritalin used to be the same size and color as methadone until one pharmacist accidentally put Methadone in some kids prescription of Ritalin. No one could figure out what was wrong with the kid, even as far as making the kid take more of it. The kid died. That's how you accidentally overdose.
I've got 101 mod points and you can't have them!
Maybe not on your planet, but here on earth, educated people have a much better chance of making money, and people with money are likely to get a better education. People with poor reading skills, or other problems with communication are likely to be on very low incomes all their lives.
I acknowledge that educated people can be poor whether short or long term, but they are not the same boat at all.
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You've never been in serious pain then.
Even a perfect health 20 year old in a scale of 1 to 10, a 10 in pain will not only forget they took a painkiller, but will want the pain to subside so badly that taking another one is certainly a thought process they go through.
Stick a railroad spike in your head and then pour salt and lime juice on it. Then tell me you will sit there and remember you took a pain pill 30 minutes ago.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
And, what's more, there are pieces of shit who advocate even canceling what little we give to the unfortunate.
figures why the world is STILL deep in shit in godfrigging 21st century.
Read radical news here
We use it like that here in the US, but thanks to our Puritanical roots, we frequently see it used only "unofficially" in that capacity.
We have tons of rules regarding where methadone clinics can go, how many people they can serve, under what conditions people can use it, how long, etc. So you end up seeing a lot of methadone prescribed for "chronic pain", despite the fact that it really kinda sucks for the whole "pain management" thing that opiates normally excel at.
Really, it does one and only thing well - It keeps people from going into withdrawal.
So basically, when you see a cluster of poor minorities with loq education OD'ing on this stuff, it doesn't mean their doctors have failed, it means a not-quite-ex-addict tried to get high on it and learned the hard way that it doesn't work very well for that, either.
Washington State is controlled by Democrats. The majority of both houses of the legislature there are Democrats, as is the current governor and the last two governors before her. I expect, though, that you're too busy hating Republicans to recognize the Democrats are no different.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Doctors are overpaid
Can we please stop this shit? Blaming doctors doesn't help you, and they are generally not overpaid. For the length and stress of their training, the debt they incur, and the difficult lifestyle many specialties must endure permanently, most doctors are actually underpaid - in overall salary, in compensation per hour, or both.
I know primary care physicians who've been forced quit the business after 30 years and had to go work somewhere else. How does a doctor who can't afford to be a doctor, and doesn't have enough savings to retire after 30 years, fit with your ignorant screed that doctors are overpaid?
I also know surgeons, many of whom do make $300,000 a year, and I've never seen one of them sit still for more than 15 minutes, to watch a movie or lecture, without passing out. They work a minimum of 60 hours a week and constantly get paged for surgery in the middle of the night, whether or not they're actually 'on call'.
So many types of doctor make so little that people are quitting left and right, while med students refuse to even consider the specialty, and many other types work so many hours with such a poor quality of life that their compensation per hour (not to mention per 3 am emergency call) makes engineering and business look like much better careers.
Many doctors are underpaid; many others are overpaid but massively overworked and overstressed. The cross-section of doctors who are both overpaid and live comfortable lifestyles is much, much smaller than you think.
Methadone's pharmacokinetics give it a long half-life, and therefore a long duration of action. This is an asset in managing chronic pain from cancer and some other diseases. Methadone has much less tendency to lose its analgesic effect through habituation. Morphine, for example, while an effective pain reliever due to its action on the mu-opioid receptor, has a metabolite that acutally upregulates perception of pain due to action on the NMDA system. This latter effect probably accounts for most of the often-observed dose escalation needed to maintain effective analgesia in patients treated with morphine. The primary danger of methadone is that physicians who are unaware of its comparitively slow pharmacokinetics overdose their patients because they escalate the dose too fast. It is critical to make changes (either increase or decrease) in methadone dosage *slowly* - when that is done, the drug can provide chronic pain relief with a much better combination of safety and long-term effectiveness than many of the other opiates. As always, ignorance seems to be the most deadly disease.
I can't believe the number of comments here about doctors being assholes, overpaid, incompetent, etc. You ungrateful, ignorant people need to wake up and realize that doctors are just as miserable under this system as the rest of you.
First, doctors hate the most expensive parts of medicine even more than you do; they'd be ecstatic to see that business go away. Patients incur as much as half of their lifetime medical costs in the last six months or year of their life. Doctors who know it's simply time for someone to die are forced to keep them alive for a few last weeks or months by whining families who can't accept death and by stupid laws that require extreme intervention to the very end. Many people won't sign DNR orders until they've already hung on far too long, if ever; the families rarely sign them for someone too far gone to sign themselves. It's gotten so bad there's even a phenomenon called the Silent Code, when the physician running an emergency resuscitation tacitly lets a terminal and hopeless patient slip away; they walk the line between honoring laws / families' wishes and the Hippocratic duty to do no harm by not prolonging suffering. Most doctors wish that palliative care and letting people go at their time could be official; a significant minority favor outright assisted suicide. Those brave enough to take some action now do things like silent codes. How does risking your license and reducing your billable hours by letting a patient die display the kind of greedy, insensitive behavior you people seem to think almost all doctors display?
And as for the money, doctors as a whole are not overpaid; doctors may average almost $200,000 a year, and the existence of specialist surgeons who make $700,000 a year makes it easy to assume they're all overpaid, but a complete statistical look at doctor's salaries - one that includes median, mode, and spread indicators- will tell you that the typical salary is pretty fair for a field that involves a minimum of 11 years higher education (often stretching past 15), $150,000+ in educational debt, and usually takes a lot more than 40 hours a week.
So some doctors are overpaid, and some doctors are callous. Show me a profession with neither of those problems. The majority of doctors are paid no more than a fair wage (or even not enough), care deeply about their patients, hate the waste and legal bullshit of medicine much more than you do, and are really tired of taking shit from people who think they like the system this way or got into medicine for the money.
The longer you assholes complain about doctors being stupid or only caring about money, the more stupid pricks who only care about the money will be the only ones willing to go to medical school. That's already starting, in my opinion. Enjoy reaping what you've sown.
In terms of pharmacodynamics, methadone is a garden variety opiate. It has two major distinctions: it has good oral bioavailability, and it is long-acting (i.e. it has slow pharmacokinetics). These are major advantages for people with chronic pain. Morphine has poor oral activity, and also wears off fast. This makes it good for intravenous infusion in a hospital setting, but terrible for patients with severe chronic pain. One aspect of opiate analgesia is that once the pain "breaks through," it is hard to knock it down again. Opiates work best for pain relief if blood levels are kept reasonably constant. So with a short acting opiate, patients have to be constantly popping pills. A long-acting opiate makes it possible for a patient with chronic pain to live something approaching a normal life.
Respiratory depression by opiates tracks very well with pain relief, so it is not plausible that the respiratory depression would greatly outlast the pain relief, as claimed in the article. Moreover, we have a huge amount of experience with methadone, because it is widely used for opiate maintenance in opiate addicts. Opiate addicts take methadone under supervision, so they can't escalate their doses. So we know that when methadone is taken as prescribed on a regular basis, it is safe and effective, and toxic levels do not build up in the body.
I think that this is a problem of poor patient and physician education and poor choices by physicians in prescribing a long-acting drug to patients who don't really understand what that means. The average patient has no experience with long-acting pain relievers, because all of the commonly used medications such as hydrocodone are short-acting. The pain relief of a long-acting opiate lasts a long time, but it is also slow in onset. This is an unavoidable aspect of the pharmacokinetics of long-acting drugs. That means that you can't wait until you start hurting, then take a methadone pill and expect the pain to go away in under an hour, as with short-acting drugs. It will take days for the pain relief from methadone to build up to its full level. A patient who doesn't understand this is likely to think, "It isn't working," and take more than the prescribed dose--and then when it does build up, they end up in respiratory depression.
There is no way to have a long acting opiate pain killer drug that does not carry the same risk as methadone. The same hazards apply to oxycontin (which is a time-release formulation of a short-acting opiate, oxycodone).
So the patient needs to be told in no uncertain terms, "This isn't a drug where you can wait until you start hurting and then take a pill. It won't work, and it is dangerous to take it that way. You must take it on schedule, every day. You can't take extra even if you are hurting. If you miss a pill, don't take extra to make up. If you take more than the prescribed dose, or take it more often than prescribed, you may DIE." And the doctor needs to be absolutely certain that the patient understands this and is capable of complying. If not (or if there is not a reliable care-giver capable of controlling dosing), then the patient should be prescribed a short-acting narcotic (although this carries its own, different risks).
That and patients don't understand methadone kinetics (not too surprising). There is a tendency to 1) take extra doses to help dull the pain (or deal with withdrawal issues) and 2) medicate with something else. Typically the something else is alcohol. The combination of alcohol and methadone is especially dangerous. Two potent respiratory depressants with very different kinetics.
Methadone is the poster child for all that is screwed up with pain control and addiction in this country. As usual, it is popular to shoot the 'messenger'. Until the ability to deal with narcotic addiction is wrestled away from the DEA and until patients in general feel like their problem is more of a medical one than a legal one it's just going to get worse. As an ER doc, I'm seeing methadone in a lot of urine drug screens these days. Talking to patients (the ones that will talk, anyway) they are mostly taking it to deal with withdrawal symptoms when they can't get their drug of choice. Of course, that leads them to manage their problem on their own with a very dangerous drug. Not a terribly safe nor effective combination.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!