Criminalization of a science whistle blower

Posted by Dobrien 5 years, 11 months ago to Science
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Well well well. Do they want you Well?


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  • Posted by ewv 5 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Obviously drug junkies become addicted. Legitimate medicine is not addictive when properly used. It's not a conspiracy by "Big Pharma" and the medical profession is not "a bunch of dumb asses".

    Please review the guidelines for posting here and take your "HaHa" taunting, loutish posts elsewhere.
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  • Posted by $ Abaco 5 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Gosh, you're really smart ewv. You have me so figured out. So...what's your answer? There is "serious of risk for addition"? ...whatever the hell that means. No risk? Just a bunch of junkies? Give it a rest. Right...like I'd make up that story. Haha! Just keep believing whatever makes you feel good about yourself...
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  • Posted by ewv 5 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    You said "If the medical industry didn't know there were risks they are a bunch of dumb asses. Haha.... ". The entire medical industry isn't "a bunch of dumb asses", that isn't funny, and one does not have to "work" in the industry to know that. Your claim to "know of a local one who actually claims that he is the messiah" has no credibility and means nothing about the "medical industry". Your constant irresponsible trashing of the medical profession with conspiracy theories and mud slinging is irrational.

    Years ago there some legitimate patients who, like Rush Limbaugh, apparently did not realize the seriousness of risk for addition (and did not contend with it properly). For years afterwords the so called "epidemic" has been about drug junkies. Doctors are fed up with being blamed for it and controlled by government policies insisting on taking over their professional decisions.
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  • Posted by $ Abaco 5 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Which way is it? They knew there were risks with opioids but chose to ignore them. They didn't know about them. Or...as you're implying, there are little to no risks with opioids and people, in general are just faking it - trying to milk the system. Which one is it? Better yet...how many years of experience do you have working in the healthcare industry? I have several years in it, but I wouldn't say I have a lot of years in it. I find the industry very, very interesting. But...if you're not in it you don't really have a clue. Oh, you can have a strong opinion. But, that and $2 will get you a Starbucks...

    So, do you really think that there isn't an actual problem with opioid addiction in this country?

    Oh, and FWIW, I personally know many dumb asses in the medical industry. Almost all of them are doctors. These people aren't gods. Shoot, I know of a local one who actually claims that he is the messiah, and prescribes himself a bunch of pain killers. Haha!
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  • Posted by ewv 5 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    The medical profession is not "dumb asses". There is always more to learn about new advances and there are always people looking for ways to exploit them for bad purposes, like drug junkies.
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  • Posted by $ Abaco 5 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    If the medical industry didn't know there were risks they are a bunch of dumb asses. Haha....
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  • Posted by ewv 5 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    They gave the warnings they knew about, even under the restrictive FSA regulations. There are possible hazards or side effects from any medical procedure. In this case, the current problem is due to people running from their own lives as they exploit the "side" effects they want.
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  • Posted by ewv 5 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    The slip 'n fall ambulance chasers are quite an 'industry'. "Settlements" are typically made because it costs more not to. "Settlements" are not evidence of cause or what kind of cause.

    The 5,454 claims for harm from vaccines were 1/10,000 of 1.7% -- .000017 -- of the over 3 billion doses of vaccines, and 32% of the claims were dismissed even under the current legal system. (The fraction of claims against vaccines is equivalent to about 550 people out of the entire US population of about 300 million.)

    All medical procedures entail some risk, due to either unusual biological reaction or in improper administration. Some problems are inevitable in large numbers of cases. It's not a plot.

    We do, however, have a big national problem with the legal shark 'profession' abusing the system for shakedowns. It causes enormous losses from the looting and gives a bad name to the legitimate cases. A portion of $3.9 billion in coerced settlements over vaccines is only a small part of it.
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  • Posted by $ Abaco 5 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Unfortunately, the medical industry dropped the ball on opioid pain killers. They almost completely failed to warn patients of the hazards. And, there are hazards.
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  • Posted by CircuitGuy 5 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    "There is no opioid epidemic"
    It's every bit as real as our gun violence epidemic and healthcare crisis, i.e. not real.

    I wonder what would happen if they just stopped the whole thing and went back to what we had 100 years ago, when you could just walk into a drug store and get your heroin in powder, tincture, or whatever format you wanted. Maybe it would be a disaster, but I actually think freed from the need to have a high potency, for smuggling purposes, you'd see people going to more easily measured doses and buying more long-acting opiods with less of a rush and crash. War proponents will say that some people might crash their car, get addicted, or run their lives, but that's happening now. The question is if it would happen more or less. And even if the problem got a little worse, how much war is worth stopping it. We could reduce drugs, kidnapping, robbery, etc if we instituted a police state with random searches of all houses and a need for papers granting permission to travel anywhere.

    I really think it's a the phony emergency du jour. It's almost on the spectrum of "human traffic" kidnappings of ordinary people going about their normal daily business or "satanism" in the 80s-- complete fiction.
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  • Posted by $ jdg 5 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    I wonder how many of those people overdosed because they needed stronger pain meds that FDA prevented them from getting.

    HHS labels gun ownership as a "crisis", too. They would rather torture millions of people than leave it up to individual adults to make their own risk/reward decisions as we are entitled.
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  • Posted by ewv 5 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    That is exactly what is happening. The only drug "epidemic" is among those who take drugs to escape from their own lives, along with the epidemic of statism demanding to control us in the name of "mobilzing", "emergencies", and "crises" as the altruist-statists demand to sacrifice innocent people to drug junkies seeking escape from their own lives.

    For all their blather about "mobilizing" against a "crisis" they never mention the harm they are causing to innocent people being made to unnecessarily suffer pain and pay the artificially escalating costs for pain medication as the statists take over the right of highly educated, dedicated doctors and other medical professionals to think and act within their own profession.
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  • Posted by ewv 5 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Federal and state governments have been for years blaming the doctors as an excuse to interfere in the practice of medicine. The notion that doctors can't be trusted to think because they are "too easily persuaded" is typical of rationalizations for statism.

    Freedom is based on the moral principle that the individual's fundamental means of living is to think and act for himself; statism insists that we are all incompetent to think and must be told what to believe and do. Doctors do not do whatever "Big Pharma" salesmen tell them to do, and doctors are becoming increasingly alarmed and angry at the combination of intrusions and insults.

    Pompous statements like "President Donald J. Trump has mobilized his entire Administration to address opioid abuse by directing the declaration of a nationwide Public Health Emergency" are typical of the statist rhetoric demanding to "mobilize" for an "emergency" in all realms of our lives.
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  • Posted by ewv 5 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    None of that means the "Big Pharma" has made people become addicted. There was a period when doctors did not realize the potential for addiction to a very useful and effective means of pain control. It was not a plot by "Big Pharma". For years the 'epidemic' has been caused by people who confuse pain with life and deliberately indulge in drugs. Now governments are interfering with doctors' decisions in legitimate pain control of all kinds, causing innocent people to suffer for the supposed benefit of druggies escaping their own lives.
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  • Posted by 5 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    A little history helps in considering the investigation by the attorneys general. Starting in the mid-1970s, as Percocet and Vicodin started showing up in the medicine cabinet, doctors were being told the drugs could work wonders in managing pain. In 1980, a New England Journal of Medicine report stated that addiction shouldn’t be of concern. In the ’80s, pain-management specialists like Russell Portenoy were telling doctors and patients that opioid painkillers were safe and a more humane alternative to surgery.

    In the ’90s, Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin debuted. Doctors started talking about doing a better job of treating pain. Purdue created a video promotion sent to doctors’ offices that showcased patients who had reclaimed their lives from chronic pain, and an expert in the videos claimed the drugs came without serious side effects.

    Sales of the painkillers mushroomed, and during the first years of this century, pain management through opioid prescriptions became the expectation.

    In 2011, Portenoy and others began reversing their recommendations as addictions to opioids, either prescription drugs or illegals like heroin, began to rise.

    “Clearly,” Portenoy said, “if I had an inkling of what I know now then, I wouldn’t have spoken in the way that I spoke. It was clearly the wrong thing to do.”
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  • Posted by 5 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    More than 300,000 Americans have died from overdoses involving opioids since 2000. President Donald J. Trump has mobilized his entire Administration to address opioid abuse by directing the declaration of a nationwide Public Health Emergency.
    A recent report in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Internal Medicine suggests that it might be time to reexamine this issue, particularly the relationship between physicians and the pharmaceutical industry. Some of the findings are leaving many reeling and questioning whether or not they can even trust their own doctor. Among the more pertinent, and alarming, of the results is how easily doctors can be persuaded to prescribe drugs like brand-name statins (lipid and cholesterol-lowering medications) by pharmaceutical manufacturers. The research included nearly 2,500 physicians.
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  • -1
    Posted by 5 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Opioid overdoses caused more than 42000 deaths in 2016, more than any previous year on record. In 2017 HHS declared a public health emergency to combat the crisis.
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  • Posted by $ jdg 5 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    There is no opioid epidemic. It's another phony emergency, made up to justify the war on pain patients. The most likely result is that it will force pain patients to seek illegal drugs instead of the regular, known-safe medications being demonized by the liars selling the story of an epidemic.
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  • Posted by ewv 5 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    "Big Pharma" is not making people become addicted to otherwise legitimate drugs.
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  • Posted by ewv 5 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    The fact is, you don't know. Not nearly enough has been explained. Her emotional sob story is badly lacking details and does not make her right or justify the conspiracy mentality and other speculation about what 'has got' to be.
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  • Posted by ewv 5 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    It is equally "stupid" for anyone to acquiesce, yet almost everyone does it. Everyone has an interest in the private economy and the success of business. They acquiesce, including big business, because they don't know any better; they have no understanding of what to advocate. Big business doesn't either, including the Kochs, who mostly fund politics. All of them are thinking short term as pragmatists. If the right philosophical ideas on behalf of reason, individualism and freedom are not spread intellectually this will not change.
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  • Posted by $ Olduglycarl 5 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    The first link has the Institute under suspicion...and of course, the second is their twisted attack to save face...that's what humanoids do.
    Other scientist validated or otherwise were on the same track but lacked the balls to stick up for their work.

    Running anything thru an animal brain to reduce toxicity has got to present problems like bacteria/viruses etc that are present in that animal...would of never posed harm to humans unless one eats mouse brains breakfast...even ole Dino knows better.
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