Reflections shared with me from Dr. Lachlan Forrow this evening
Eric Cassell - "Hope has *nothing* to do with probabilities"
2/"Everything that is done in the world is done by hope."
Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, Jr.
3/Hope is your superpower. Don’t let anybody or anything make you hopeless. Hope is the enemy of injustice,” Stevenson said. “Hope is what will get you to stand up when people tell you to sit down.”
Bryan Stevenson
4/I’ve been hearing this phrase y’all got over here that I ain’t too crazy about.
‘It’s the hope that kills you.’
Y’all know that? I disagree, you know?
I think it’s the lack of hope that comes and gets you. See, I believe in hope. I believe in belief.” /end
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Hey: 👩🏽⚕️👨🏽⚕️🧑🏼⚕️
I'm sick of stories on health care that erase and dumb down the professional roles & responsibilities of clinicians (doctors, nurses, etc) – whether it’s @nytimes on genetic screening or @DopesickOnHulu on opioids. /1
The public is flooded with stories about health care that show health professionals as, well,
patsies, victims and cogs.
Health professionals need to ask "why we look that way" to them, and push back /2
That’s what got me talking in our latest podcast from @OnHealer.
We reviewed a @nytimes story of highly marketed prenatal screening tests.
These tests do traumatize moms if results come in without appropriate clinical counseling.
Listen: pod.link/healer/episode… /3
1/Briefs were filed for the Supreme Court today, on whether doctors will continue to be criminally convicted under the Controlled Substances Act when Rx’s were offered in good faith.
Our team’s work was cited in the @national_pain amicus whose thread covers the law.
2/The use of criminal charges and prison as a method of regulating US opioid prescribing is a U.S.-specific phenomenon.
It reflects the legacy of the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act (1914) and the Controlled Substances Act (1971).
It is a choice we made that other countries didn’t
3/as opioid overdoses rose, Department of Justice announced its intention to use “data tools” to drive prosecutions, ie investigate higher prescribers - justice.gov/opa/pr/attorne…
1/There is one upcoming Supreme Court Case to follow for anyone who cares about criminal prosecutions of doctors for prescriptions of opioid medicine - specifically Rx where intentions were to deliver appropriate medical care: Ruan v. USA supremecourt.gov/docket/docketf…
2/The central question comes down to whether it is a federal crime for a physician to prescribe opioids, in a way where the government’s experts contend it was imprudent or unwise, when that physician intended and reasonably believed they were acting within standard of care
3/Most prosecutions of non-MDs under the Controlled Substance Act require “mens rea” criminal intent.
If I sell you a PlayStation, believing it is a PlayStation, which turns out to have cocaine inside, I can’t be convicted of a criminal violation of CSA. No criminal intent
2/Bear in mind that our work considered Housing First with “eyes open” as I had raised relevant questions as to what it can deliver, most especially where addiction is part of the picture pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19523126/
3/However, on whole and despite the very real challenges that will happen when housing people with serious mental illness and addiction challenge, the data have been reassuring as to potential for success, like this pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21285095/
1/It is helpful to see a review of the concerns raised by professionals & patients prior to the publication of the 2016 CDC Opioid Prescribing Guideline - take a look. I will add highlights from my 2016 docket submission. Nearly all issues re-emerged in published research
2/ CDC’s Dose-related recommendations prioritized *relative* risk over *absolute* risk, and minimized consideration of interaction of risk and protective factors -
This is different from approaches applied to nearly all other risk evaluations in medicine (eg NSTEMI, A-fib)
2/Our team at @UABNews has been running a preliminary version of a larger planned study, a survey to reach family survivors to learn about these tragedies one by one, like safety investigators would an airplane crash. We think that is the place to start. It is called CSI:OPIOIDs
3/As a clinician, I have been advocating to address these losses since 2016.
In 2018, I began urging federal study of the individual suicides, because large database statistics, concerning as they are, don’t reveal the circumstances around losses. We have to look closely.