Relieving pain isn’t a simple issue of taking a pill and feeling better. It’s a complicated cornucopia of treatments ranging from over-the-counter remedies to holistic healing to prescription medications, with some $300 billion a year spent each year on painkillers in the U.S. alone.
Treating pain is also risky business, with studies showing that consumers often aren’t aware of what’s in the over-the-counter medications they take, resulting indeaths from something as seemingly innocuous as kids-formula acetaminophen.
At the same time, there is growing concern about the overuse of prescription painkillers, with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently urging doctors to give some thought to how generous they are with their prescription pad, saying that the overprescription of opioids is a “key driver of America’s drug-overdose epidemic.”
In the current issue of Consumer Reports, our colleagues take an in-depth look at the current state of painkiller use and abuse. Here are just some of the key takeaways:
1.) Prescription painkiller overuse and abuse is rampant: Every day, more than 1,000 Americans are treated in emergency rooms for misusing opioid painkillers like Percocet and Vicodin.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 14,000 Americans died of overdoses involving prescription opioids in 2014 alone.
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DelMarVa's Premier Source for News, Opinion, Analysis, and Human Interest Contact Publisher Joe Albero at alberobutzo@wmconnect.com or 410-430-5349
6 comments:
to me this is a way bigger issue than making pot legal. At least the pot will not make you steal from your friends and become a leech on society like the pills do.
I continue to be amazed at how may physicians there are who keep prescribing these poisons. And they call themselves professionals.
Some wish that they could prescribe as they like, but government has seen to it that drug companies control what's right and what's not.
The AMA and every other physician and nursing based professional organization should pull it together and tell the feds what they think.
The science is already there. Make it work for you and your patients.
Drug companies pay people to sell their drugs to doctors. Drugs are advertised on TV for symptoms you probably don't even have! We are one of 2 nations in the WORLD that advertise pharmaceuticals on television. It's despicable. They create an opiate-dependent society that turns to heroin when they can't afford or obtain their prescription drugs. But hey, that's capitalism eh
Agreed! At least most Heroin dealers have the decency to not get little kids hooked.
Big PHARMA a deadly industry killing many, curing nothing. They only seek to keep you alive to suck you dry keep you hooked on chemicals drugs instead of some natural cures but not FDA apppoved. The FDA the other piece of the puzzle. Poisoning us from food to drugs. Do you see what goes in most of our food? POISONS
Lies, all lies. Haven't any of you figured out their patterns yet? They create crisis' every so often then offer a remedy, a new law, or whatever they are trying to push at the time. Whatever happened to that last epidemic that was gong to kill tons of people but suddenly disappeared never to be heard of again? Ebola? Now this 'new' virus Zika, which has been around for 60+ years has suddenly become deadly and with birth defects. ( after the gov started engineering the mosquitoes where the 'outbreak' happened. )
Turn your t.v.'s off, talk to people. Investigate, research. Open your minds. Think. And stop believing everything you hear, esp from this or any other government or it's agencies.
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