I have been listening to The Fighter Pilot Podcast because my fantasy career would have been to fly a jet fighter plane (not even remotely possible, given my constitution). I learned that when an aircraft accident occurs, a mishap board is convened, not to assign blame but to try to learn what went wrong and…
Acute gout can be very painful, causing patients to seek treatment in the emergency department. A retrospective study of pain interventions for gout in Rhode Island found that nearly 30% of patients received prescriptions for opioid medications over 30 months. Of these prescriptions, over 80% were for patients who had never been exposed to opioids…
ATLANTA—Rheumatic diseases have been the subject of a range of public health campaigns and reports over the past decade, but improving their visibility remains a work in progress, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) expert said at the 2019 ACR/ARP Annual Meeting. A growing attention to pain and the opioid crisis may help…
The opioid epidemic in the U.S. has destroyed thousands of lives and torn families apart. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an average of 130 people in the U.S. die each day from an opioid overdose. From 1999 to 2017, more than 700,000 died as a result of drug overdoses. In 2017,…
More than 72,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses in 2017, according to the National Institutes of Health.1 The impact of the opioid epidemic has affected many levels of patient care and, as a result, healthcare systems are responding to escalating death rates, new legislation and the possibility of compromised patient safety in a multitude of…
The prevalence of chronic opioid use among patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) doubled between 2002 and 2015, especially among patients with severe pain or on antidepressants, according to a new study.1 The study adds to prior data reporting trends in chronic opioid use in RA patients.2,3 Severe pain was the strongest predictor for use of…
On Feb. 9, 2019, protesters gathered at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City to lead a march down Fifth Avenue to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.1 As a general rule, news from the world of art is not a topic discussed in these pages, but if you indulge me for just a little bit…
NEW YORK (Reuters Health)—Many U.S. clinicians aren’t following risk-mitigation practices for opioid prescribing, new findings show. “In response to this national opioid crisis, consensus-based safer opioid prescribing guidelines have been published and state laws regulating opioid prescribing practices have been enacted,” Daniel P. Alford, MD, of Boston University School of Medicine, and colleagues write in…
It should not be a surprise to anyone that the U.S. is facing a national opioid crisis. It may be a surprise, however, that the federal government recently passed a law to address this crisis—a law that may have a profound impact on many healthcare facilities, some of which are not involved in the substance…
BOSTON (Reuters)—The former chief executive of Insys Therapeutics Inc pleaded guilty on Wednesday to participating in a nationwide scheme to bribe doctors to prescribe an addictive opioid medication and has agreed to become a government witness. Michael Babich, who resigned as the Arizona-based drugmaker’s CEO in 2015, pleaded guilty in federal court in Boston to…