@ehBeth,
The HHS evidence made me question the entire "painkiller" industry only after I was reading some stats on drug overdoses and after I underwent my own kidney surgery.( I was kinda amazed at how everybody on care staff was pushing oxy drugs)
HHS stats say that we have about 500 K people addicted to heroin in the US but another 2+ Million addicted to synthetic opiods. ALl the opioids are first gotten by prescription, then, as the drug dependency is manifest, I assume its gotten by "connections"
Now with the addition of fentanil, which is reportedly 100 times more potent than heroin and synthetic "oxy" opioids we have about 8K people dying from heroin od's and almost 20K people dying from synthetic opioid ods.
The obvious connection of drug dependency to care physicians screams out for answers to how do all these people get introduced to these drug to the extent that weve got more people drugged out on pain killers for no other purpose than to get high.
Ive got several friends who are physician specialists and in ER medicine. They have very little actul training in their annul CEU requirements that deal in pharmacology.
As one of my friends (an internal med guy) says
"Most of us get a lot of our training from the drug salesmen" The docs will be sponsored to a days "seminar" on new drugs from comapny A or B, and will give out several CEU's because thats the way the state med ed board has had it worked out by the pharmas.
My internal med friend two years ago took time off and went to Johns Hopkins for an intensive seminar on synthetic opioid pharmacology. He has since made major changes in his hospital duties wrt dispensing such drugs.
His POV is that depending on ones own body chemistry, dependency is really damned difficult to predict and limiting use of opioids by the hospital is more responsible "dispensury".
Oxy, as a gateway drug seems to be more prevelwnt in dental procedures than almost anything else (according to him I had no way to check any stats on that).
I guess the good news is that we no longer have the equally big problem of bikers strung out on crystql meth and shooting up a bar.