How is it that so many intelligent people seem to be unable to think for themselves & are engaging in behavior they previously found to be abhorrent? This professor of psychology, Mattias Desmet, explains: youtu.be/uLDpZ8daIVM

We need an investigation. Who benefits from cutting off pain patients from daily opioids and shuffling them into addiction treatment? Follow the 💰: Pharma & addiction orgs funded by companies like Indivior KOLs & “experts” making millions as witnesses & advisors Gov-affiliated nonprofits (CDC Foundation, FNIH) Legislators pushing bills to slash Rx opioids while taking law firm $$ (Wyden, McCaskill, etc.) Media darlings like Humphreys, who sits on Indivior’s board pulling 6-figures while shaping drug policy Meanwhile, our inbox is flooded, especially with elderly patients cut off and abandoned. Patients lose. The addiction industry wins. Time to trace the $$$. #PainPatients #OpioidPolicy #Accountability

The Addiction Myth: Why dependency isn’t the same as addiction. They’ve blurred the lines on purpose — and pain patients are paying the price. 🧵

If we stopped erasing the line between dependency and addiction, we could: ✅ Treat addiction as the compulsive brain disorder it is. ✅ Treat pain as the complex medical problem it is. ✅ Stop punishing patients just trying to live.

Anyone who steps forward knows that patients with long term pain, who happen to be receiving prescribed opioids- appropriately- are *being abandoned, *losing docs with no one willing to step forward to help them *facing extraordinary suffering, up to and including death from medical deterioration, pain, suicide (We learn these stories routinely in our suicide study CSI:Opioids) What @ibdgirl76 bears witness too is a disaster brought on by more than one cause: -a fight against pills that ignored the **people with pain** -countless paid experts for the opioid litigation who have argued - fallaciously- that every dependence is an addiction, and who routinely use their social media to make light of the risks faced by patients with pain -countless storytellers, journalists and politicians who have been taught to embrace people with addiction (or at least pretend to) while shunning folks with pain or dependence on a medication . -a medical establishment that, having chosen to embrace prescribing excessively before 2011, made a fetish of “opioid stewardship” (as if our first duty was to guard the opioids and not the patients) and “deprescribing” (as if our first duty was to a implement procedural change in care and not to the patient who is our equal, in human terms) Luckily: many of my colleagues and even the CDC’s 2022 Guideline have begun to understand. But unluckily, people with pain and disability don’t have sufficient political power to cause journalists to ask better questions or to change national policy But if you are a doctor or doctor in training, please understand just because opioids were once overprescribed in the past, that doesn’t make it right to abandon people who might need them, or are dependent on them. There are experts who could help us learn how to take the best possible care of patients. And it is not rocket science. Every time someone simply says “I don’t prescribe those pills,” realize they are shutting their door on patients who are at high risk. They can learn to be smart and careful with this responsibility, and save lives. But it has to start with a spark of conscience that says “the patient is a real human being just like me. And I might be vulnerable to someday. And just as I would want someone to help take care of me, now it’s my turn as a prescriber or as a doctor to not abandon patients.”

The only appropriate role for a health insurance company is to pay bills, not to "manage" care. The only appropriate decision-makers in health care are patients and their doctors.

I would like to emphasize the need for greater understanding and empathy towards those who endure chronic pain on a daily basis. The struggle to obtain necessary pain management medications, such as opioids, can be both challenging and inhumane..

DO NOT EAT ANYTHING WITH THIS LABEL!!

The anti-opioid lobby is freaking out. Over 200 comments asking the FDA to leave long acting opioid medications You have two more days to submit a comment Click this link regulations.gov/docket/FDA-2…

The Secretary of Health and Human Services is a life-long Democrat and environmental lawyer, who spent his life fighting corporate waste dumping and regulatory capture by Big Pharma. Yet every Dem voted NO, with Liz Warren upset that suing drug companies cuts their profits.🤷‍♂️

Tulsi Gabbard sacrificed her career in the Dem Party to endorse Bernie Sanders, and in return for what she did for him, he votes "No" on her appointment for DNI so he can remain in good standing with the Party that cheated him 2 times

DO YOU KNOW WHY Big Insurance denies life-saving medications to patients in the US on a daily basis? Because they know they can do it without any legal consequence. They know patients have no meaningful legal recourse. Big Insurance has bought off politicians- red and blue. Big Insurance's lobbyists wrote the laws that protect them from patients and physicians. Here's how we very quickly solve the ugly Big Insurance greed problem: Give patients the legal right to sue Big Insurance and PBMs for substantial money damages, including punitive damages, when the patient can prove: 1. Big Insurance or PBMs delayed or denied care prescribed by a reasonably prudent MD/DO/NP/PA, AND: 2. Patient can prove that he or she was injured or killed by the denial/ delay of care. Help Big Insurance and their morally bankrupt boards of directors regain their moral compass. Support a private cause of action against Big Insurance and PBMs!

On the eve of the confirmation hearings for @RobertKennedyJr, I'd like to share my pinned post that I've had pinned for 6 plus years. I invite you to read through some of it. My son has suffered with numerous medical issues, all while not being able to verbalize what he's experienced. He's 29 & can't talk. He suffers from full body apraxia. That means he can't get his body to do what he wants it to do. Seizures started when he turned 21 years old making a difficult life a lot more difficult. His experience is not unique for children & adults who have been diagnosed with autism after a vaccine injury. Children who have been acceptable collateral damage in the war on disease. I posted a picture of my son at the gym in Dec 2018, a social media influencer picked up on it, shared it & I got hate for days. Why? Because I said something about vaccine injury. We've been conditioned as a global society not to see vaccines as doing anything but good. They've never been studied for harm, in fact, they've never been properly studied at all. Sam will require 24/7 care & supervision for the rest of his life. When he was diagnosed at 2 years old in 1998 the rate of autism was somewhere between 1 in 2500 to 1 in 1000 (depending on the source) & then the numbers kept climbing. Today, according to the CDC, the rate is 1 in 36 children. As a nation we can't afford all of this autism. For families it is devastating financially & emotionally. We must stop disabling children for life. We must acknowledge the harm & provide these injuried people with exemplary services & a dignified life. With decent places to live, trained & caring staff & purposeful lives. They deserve it! The lives our children were meant to have were stolen away from them. RFKjr understands what they have endured & he speaks passionately about our children. He is the ONLY person who will work to right this wrong. Please contact your senators if you haven't already & please pray RFKjr is confirmed. Thank you for reading. I just feel like we are at a place I wasn't sure we'd ever be at. This has been decades in the making & everything feels like it's riding on this moment for our vaccine injured loved ones. #ConfirmRFKJr @SenateGOP @SenateDems @SenJonHusted @berniemoreno

I have 30 screws, 6 rods and 14 sets of connecting hardware in my spine. I used to get the pain treatment I needed, but that stopped years ago. If I can’t get pain control you won’t get pain control. When your Spouse, child or grandparent is suffering and crying, I warned you

The Pain Care Crisis: A Call for Compassionate Policy The majority of people who rely on RX opiate medicines for chronic pain are being unfairly penalized and harmed due to policies aimed at 'misuse'. Thread...1/ #PainCareCrisis

CDC lied and now people have died, and are still dying. In 2018 the CDC quietly admitted it lied about the cause of the opioid epidemic. The CDC originally claimed it was overprescribing. The CDC used illegal drug deaths to inflate actual prescribing deaths to create a epidemic

FWIW, rx pain medicine has been lumped into a larger set of illicit drugs, and squishy terminology has been used to confuse the issue ... and pain patients seeking relief from horrible physical conditions are vilified as fakers and much worse.

And this happens

Since the early 2000s, a group of self-interested antisocial clinicians has led a vile ad hominem campaign against patients with #ChronicPain. Patients are denied medication, then forced to have invasive procedures that often don’t work. Never in the history of medicine has a patient group been treated so poorly. The dignity and respect due any human being has denied to patients with #ChronicPain. We don’t know the facts of the Mangione case. And violence is never a viable option. However, we need to re-examine how American medicine treats the chronically ill, especially those with chronic pain.