Painkiller on Netflix. 4 4

[VintageComics]

"All of human behavior is comprised of two things.

Run from pain. Run toward pleasure.

Pain, pleasure.

If we place ourselves right there, between pain and pleasure we will never have to worry about money again."

I heard it was great. Has anyone watched it?

 

Edited August 19, 2023 by VintageComics

[Dr. Balls]

Looks interesting, and with Matthew Broderick no less. He looks like he'll be great in this. 

Fun factoid: When Medicare/Medicaid patients went to the hospital for their various ailments - they were given followup questionnaires to determine if physicians had met their "pain needs", and if they said 'no' or scored low marks, the hospital would have their Medicare/Medicaid payments withheld until a followup with the patient. So the general philosophy of the hospital became that doctors and PAs write scripts for the maximum amount of pain medication refills - ensuring that everyone was over medicated with addictive pills to ensure they would receive their payment. For instance, if you hurt your back mowing your lawn and went to the ER for pain medication, you'd likely walk out with a -script for two weeks worth of pills, when you should only need enough for three days.

This was back in 2015 - not sure how it works now.

[Dr. Love]

How it works now. 

If you hurt your back you won't receive pain meds from a hospital or your primary or the pain management practice your primary sent you to. If the words pain meds come out of your mouth not only will you be denied but your chart is likely to be updated to include the notation "drug seeking behavior" and you being invited to seek treatment elsewhere.

Stay healthy my friends!

[kmfbaloo]

Is this similar to Dopesick?

[VintageComics]

On 8/19/2023 at 3:01 PM, Dr. Balls said:

Looks interesting, and with Matthew Broderick no less. He looks like he'll be great in this. 

Fun factoid: When Medicare/Medicaid patients went to the hospital for their various ailments - they were given followup questionnaires to determine if physicians had met their "pain needs", and if they said 'no' or scored low marks, the hospital would have their Medicare/Medicaid payments withheld until a followup with the patient. So the general philosophy of the hospital became that doctors and PAs write scripts for the maximum amount of pain medication refills - ensuring that everyone was over medicated with addictive pills to ensure they would receive their payment. For instance, if you hurt your back mowing your lawn and went to the ER for pain medication, you'd likely walk out with a --script for two weeks worth of pills, when you should only need enough for three days.

This was back in 2015 - not sure how it works now.

We had an extensive discussion on this very topic years ago and we had several doctors chime in.

They would push the meds hard. 

"What? You have pain? Here take lots." was basically the feedback we had from Dr's during the discussion. 

That they literally destroyed millions of lives - MILLIONS over greed is so scandalous it can't be understated. Can't wait to see this. 

[musicmeta]

This does look interesting.  I'll watch it. 

[jsilverjanet]

On 8/21/2023 at 10:59 PM, VintageComics said:

We had an extensive discussion on this very topic years ago and we had several doctors chime in.

They would push the meds hard. 

"What? You have pain? Here take lots." was basically the feedback we had from Dr's during the discussion. 

That they literally destroyed millions of lives - MILLIONS over greed is so scandalous it can't be understated. Can't wait to see this. 

do you have a link to this thread?

[namisgr]

The recommendations of Medical Boards throughout the country and prescription volume records make clear that the doctors running pill factories that have historically accounted for the majority of opioid prescriptions are a very small minority of practicing physicians.  Combined with a couple of unethical and criminal manufacturers, like Purdue Pharma, and the supply of strong pain relievers with a high abuse liability was way, way, way more than necessary for medically justified strong pain relief.  Since then, some of the worst offending onshore manufacturers, like Purdue and Endo, have been assessed massive fines and been forced into bankruptcy.  Progress too late for many, but of benefit going forward.

There have not only been clampdowns on the manufacturers and ultra high volume prescribers, but ordinary prescribers now deal with increased oversight and regulation, as Dr. Love alluded to earlier.  In 2011 when I had surgery to fix an abdominal hernia I was prescribed 30 vicodin tablets.  In 2021 when I had surgery to repair a different abdominal hernia I was prescribed 5, which was still enough.  Unfortunately, the recent tightening of the manufacturing and prescription processes has been overcome by the illegal manufacture, smuggling, and abuse of fentanyl.

Edited August 22, 2023 by namisgr

[VintageComics]

On 8/22/2023 at 12:17 PM, namisgr said:

The recommendations of Medical Boards throughout the country and prescription volume records make clear that the doctors running pill factories that have historically accounted for the majority of opioid prescriptions are a very small minority of practicing physicians.  Combined with a couple of unethical and criminal manufacturers, like Purdue Pharma, and the supply of strong pain relievers with a high abuse liability was way, way, way more than necessary for medically justified strong pain relief.  Since then, some of the worst offending onshore manufacturers, like Purdue and Endo, have been assessed massive fines and been forced into bankruptcy.  Progress too late for many, but of benefit going forward.

There have not only been clampdowns on the manufacturers and ultra high volume prescribers, but ordinary prescribers now deal with increased oversight and regulation, as Dr. Love alluded to earlier.  In 2011 when I had surgery to fix an abdominal hernia I was prescribed 30 vicodin tablets.  In 2021 when I had surgery to repair a different abdominal hernia I was prescribed 5, which was still enough.  Unfortunately, the recent tightening of the manufacturing and prescription processes has been overcome by the illegal manufacture, smuggling, and abuse of fentanyl.

If it wasn't Purdue, it would be someone else. 

The problem isn't solely Purdue. The problem is the philosophy of Western Medicine which is allopathic, solved using manufactured, chemical based solutions that are damaging to the body....and worst of all, highly profitable. One of the most profitable industries in the world, but ALSO the MOST CORRUPT.

THAT is the deadly combination.

Big Pharma spends MORE MONEY ON LOBBYING AND ADVERTISING THAN ALMOST ANY OTHER INDUSTRY IN THE US. So how can the average person resist?

They can't as can be seen by the graph below (everyone likes charts, right?

No other country allows this. 

And it is a fact that the more money is involved the more corruption is involved. 

The problem is not one company. The problem is terrible ideology and philosophy in Western culture.

Tell me, which part of this chart would you say is related to Purdue Pharma?

Edited September 2, 2023 by VintageComics

[Microchip]

On 9/2/2023 at 11:32 AM, VintageComics said:

If it wasn't Purdue, it would be someone else. 

The problem isn't solely Purdue. The problem is the philosophy of Western Medicine which is allopathic, solved using manufactured, chemical based solutions that are damaging to the body....and worst of all, highly profitable. One of the most profitable industries in the world, but ALSO the MOST CORRUPT.

THAT is the deadly combination.

Big Pharma spends MORE MONEY ON LOBBYING AND ADVERTISING THAN ALMOST ANY OTHER INDUSTRY IN THE US. So how can the average person resist?

They can't as can be seen by the graph below (everyone likes charts, right?

No other country allows this. 

And it is a fact that the more money is involved the more corruption is involved. 

The problem is not one company. The problem is terrible ideology and philosophy in Western culture.

Tell me, which part of this chart would you say is related to Purdue Pharma?

Deaths are only a part of the story.   Saying the prescribing problem involves a small minority of doctors is factually inaccurate by a considerable magnitude.

[VintageComics]

On 9/1/2023 at 11:24 PM, Microchip said:

Deaths are only a part of the story.  

For sure. 

Another factor NOBODY talks about is the hardship that those deaths create. Yeah, someone is dead and it's tragic but the people left behind are left with all sorts of issues to cope with. Increased mental illness, financial hardship from the loss of a parent or partner, etc. 

It's just ridiculous to consider that this was an isolated problem that only affected a small amount of people and perpetuated by a small amount of people. 

In BC, Canada (which has NOTHING to do with Purdue, American doctors or America) the #1 killer for ALL young people right now is suicide and overdoses and those numbers have steeply risen over the last 3 years in MANY countries around the world. 

It's a societal problem in many countries and it is an EPIDEMIC. Not a passing fad. 

 

A friend of mine overdosed and died last week.

That's two people I know this year and 5 in the last 2 years!! Suicide / overdoses are up 30% year over year over the last 3 years. That means up 30% from 2019, up 30% from 2020 and up 30% from 2021. Those record numbers and Government statistics.

I've never seen so many overdoses in my 52 years as I have in the last 3 years. 

I'm so glad this movie came out to raise awareness but there is a long way to go. 

 

Edited September 2, 2023 by VintageComics

[Nick Furious]

About 30 years ago, my much younger brother and sister came to visit me, and I was surprised that they wanted to go to Starbucks daily for a highly caffeinated, high sugar frozen drink.  My era didn't really do those levels of caffeine at a young age.  A few years later I noticed that the local high school had a Starbucks on one corner that had a line out the door after school, and a convenience store on the other corner that was selling cases of energy drinks daily.  It dawned on me then that we had a generation that was being raised on stimulants.  I kind of figured then that their needs would only escalate.  The opioids crisis was not something that caught me by surprise.  This generation was primed and ready for a Pharma company that would step in and fill their needs.  

[namisgr]

On 9/1/2023 at 11:24 PM, Microchip said:

Deaths are only a part of the story.   Saying the prescribing problem involves a small minority of doctors is factually inaccurate by a considerable magnitude.

sources?

Reliable ones show that roughly 75% of all opioid prescriptions in the United States are dispensed by a small handful of doctors with links to pharmacies running pill factories.  So while I agree that doctors as a group are part of the problem, there's more nuance to the problem than just that.  It's easy data to find, having been a subject of hundreds of news stories and published research studies.  Here's one of the hundreds that gives a taste, from a town of 3000 residents in West Virginia that dispensed over 30 million opioid pills: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/02/opioids-west-virginia-pill-mills-pharmacies

In case you don't want to read the entire link, here's an excerpt:

Each day, hundreds of people lined up outside an old animal feed store where a group of doctors were set up by a former pimp, just out of federal prison, to churn out opioid prescriptions faster than West Virginia’s major hospitals. Before long, people in town were calling the Williamson Wellness Center a “pill mill”.  The doctors were careful to insist their prescriptions were filled only at pharmacies that would take the money and not ask questions. 

Deaths are indeed only part of the story of addiction.  So too, are the specialty Pharmaceutical companies like Mallinckrodt, Endo, and Purdue, that got rich off them and are now in bankruptcy and facing massive punitive awards from class action lawsuits.  Also part of the story is that the opioid pill dispensing rate declined by 45% in the past ten years in the US, due to measures and regulations Dr. Love first mentioned in this thread.  Despite this, there are more opioid addicts and more overdose deaths than ever, fueled as noted earlier by the flooding of our country with illegally manufactured fentanyl.  Since the overwhelming majority of fentanyl is being supplied not by specialty Pharmaceutical companies but by the illegal route after being manufactured both here and overseas, most especially in China, it's also the case that there's a large part of the story that has nothing to do with medical practice.  Finally, Australasian countries including China have their own problems with opioid abuse, indicating it isn't simply a 'Western' problem.

So there's a lot of blame to go around, and the above only scratches the surface of it.  Here's an article from Scientific American for those interested in going further into it: We’re Overlooking a Major Culprit in the Opioid Crisis: Pharmaceutical companies and drug dealers have been part of the problem—but so have policy makers

Edited September 2, 2023 by namisgr

[VintageComics]

On 9/2/2023 at 6:46 AM, namisgr said:

So there's a lot of blame to go around, and the above only scratches the surface of it.  Here's an article from Scientific American for those interested in going further into it: We’re Overlooking a Major Culprit in the Opioid Crisis: Pharmaceutical companies and drug dealers have been part of the problem—but so have policy makers

So you're saying Big Pharma is corrupt and policy makers are corrupt. 

Well, you've convinced me. I'm sold. 

On 9/2/2023 at 6:46 AM, namisgr said:

Reliable ones show that roughly 75% of all opioid prescriptions in the United States are dispensed by a small handful of doctors with links to pharmacies running pill factories.  So while I agree that doctors as a group are part of the problem, there's more nuance to the problem than just that.  It's easy data to find, having been a subject of hundreds of news stories and published research studies.  Here's one of the hundreds that gives a taste, from a town of 3000 residents in West Virginia that dispensed over 30 million opioid pills: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/02/opioids-west-virginia-pill-mills-pharmacies

In case you don't want to read the entire link, here's an excerpt:

Each day, hundreds of people lined up outside an old animal feed store where a group of doctors were set up by a former pimp, just out of federal prison, to churn out opioid prescriptions faster than West Virginia’s major hospitals. Before long, people in town were calling the Williamson Wellness Center a “pill mill”.  The doctors were careful to insist their prescriptions were filled only at pharmacies that would take the money and not ask questions. 

For one you can't trust the media since all corporations are so inextricably tied together socio-economically now in more than one way, although that's beyond the scope of this discussion. 

When I broke my leg in 2015 I was prescribed something like 30 or so oxy pills. I can't remember the exact number but I got a big white bottle full of them. 

I was pretty out of it when I left the hospital, having been on morphine so I wasn't really paying attention to what they prescribed. 

A few of my friends use drugs regularly and got excited when I told them.

I was utterly shocked when I realized what I had. I kept the bottle for a few days but knowing how bad the shizzle is, I refused to even try one. I'd already spent a LOT of time discussing and studying the opioid epidemic before that and so I returned the bottle stating I didn't need that garbage. 

This is in Canada from a local, large hospital. 

It wasn't a "pill factory" of any sort. This was STANDARD PRACTICE. 

The pill factories didn't START the epidemic. THEY PERPETUATED IT. 

The pills STARTED the pandemic...which is why they are VERY selective now about prescribing them to anyone now. 

 

I suspect that MOST of the articles, news, "studies" and narratives were massaged by Big Pharma behind the scenes (yes, this happens - it's a normal part of business), which (I believe) has the single, most powerful lobbying economic power in the US, to shift blame away from the companies that make the drugs and put it on the relatively few isolated examples to deflect the heat away from a corrupt industry that is based on profit from human suffering. 

Or maybe a few little pill farms really did create a worldwide epidemic of drug users and Big Pharma are the good guys that tried to stop it. 

 

Edited September 5, 2023 by VintageComics

[namisgr]

There's a highly informative newsprint series on the shifting status of America's opioid problem, from which the following two figures are taken.

Opioid pill distribution map by US county.  Note that on a per person basis, and for the 14 year period of 2006-2019, the vast majority of pills were dispensed in rural areas and small towns, and the rate of pill distribution was the highest in West Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, and Tennessee.  So whereas the vast majority of physicians work in urban areas, it's elsewhere that the pill mills were operating during this time frame.

Edited September 13, 2023 by namisgr

[namisgr]

But since 2019, the distribution of opioid pills has markedly declined, and overdose deaths from them have begun to drop.  In its place, there is an epidemic of abuse of and death from fentanyl, the overwhelming majority of which is smuggled into the United States from oversees, principally from China.  The annual number of overdoses in the US from fentanyl now exceeds the number from pills by 5-fold, and from heroin by 14-fold.

Edited September 13, 2023 by namisgr

[CGC Mike]

I am moving this to the water cooler, as the sub forum in Comics General is for Comics related - Movies, TV, Video games only.  

[Ariamus]

On 8/21/2023 at 11:37 PM, kmfbaloo said:

Is this similar to Dopesick?

Same story but told differently. Painkiller is "flashier"; has more of a "Hollywood blockbuster" feel to it. Dopesick is grittier; more hard-edged. It "feels" more like a documentary. These characteristics are not surprising, particularly with the former, which is a Peter Berg creation. They're both worth watching but, given the traumatic nature of the subject matter, it can be an exercise in masochism to sit down and watch both. I'm not saying don't do that... Just know what you're getting into.

If you're making a choice, then Dopesick is my recommendation. Its style makes it feels like a more appropriate telling of the tale. Also, while the cast is strong for both, the Dopesick troupe is a powerhouse ensemble.

[500Club]

On 8/19/2023 at 6:40 PM, Dr. Love said:

If you hurt your back you won't receive pain meds from a hospital or your primary or the pain management practice your primary sent you to. If the words pain meds come out of your mouth not only will you be denied but your chart is likely to be updated to include the notation "drug seeking behavior" and you being invited to seek treatment elsewhere.

As a retired doc, I can testify to this from the other side of the desk.

Early on, after entering practice, the messaging was that these new meds were great, you didn’t have to leave people suffering, we have pain receptors in the brain that we can effectively block, and it was simply good practice to utilize these tools.

Fast forward 20 years, and these drugs were bad, people reporting pain needed to be looked at as possibly drug seeking, and our regulatory bodies were actively analyzing and overseeing opioid prescriptions.

As usual, the truth lies in the middle, and the solution is to use a tool responsibly.

[500Club]

On 9/1/2023 at 10:07 PM, VintageComics said:

Another factor NOBODY talks about is the hardship that those deaths create. Yeah, someone is dead and it's tragic but the people left behind are left with all sorts of issues to cope with. Increased mental illness, financial hardship from the loss of a parent or partner, etc. 

Yes.  When looking at an issue, death is by far the most impactful outcome, both for the individual and those left behind.

From the medical side, prescribed opioids have lessened in impact compared to the impact street level fentanyl is having, due to its inconsistency and potency.