Academic medicine: That’s where University Diaries comes in.
The family whose name emblazons med schools and med school professorships all over this country – the Sacklers – is the same family addicting America and soon the rest of the world with OxyContin. It couldn’t have done it – it can’t keep doing it – without university researchers and clinicians lying for it in exchange for money.
Now that the opioid epidemic is so deadly that politicians and journalists can’t help noticing it, we will look forward, on this blog, to publishing the names of all the professors who did their bit to make a hideous drug respectable.
December 30th, 2016 at 2:49PM
This is what happens when well-meaning bureaucrats who are out of touch with the realities of practice start making top-down policy in medicine. They elevated pain to the status of fifth vital sign (along with temperature, pulse rate, blood pressure, and respiratory rate) and they got the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals (JCAH) to sign on to that. From there it was a small step to play on the conscientiousness of physicians to get the ball rolling – especially if the suggestion of sanctions for noncompliance was in the air. And yes, they were helped by KOLs or key opinion leaders.
December 30th, 2016 at 7:28PM
no this is what happens when drug company execs decide that they just aren’t making enough money and than realize that they have on their shelves the ultimate product for boosting sales, people were and are in pain and what they all too often got from MDs was moralizing (and or ignored if they were women or racial minorities), why did we turn to such pills as the solution to something(s?) as complex and poorly understood as pain, well that’s a much longer and more complicated story which would get us into issues of how we manage and rate healthcare which gets into some of the issues BC raised but would also get into the dire lack of funding (by all accounts about to get much worse) for basic research, guess who ““I hear so much about the NIH, and it’s terrible.”?