CAUGHT LYING AGAIN: Author Jane C. Ballantyne, professor, once again asserts she has no conflicts of interest when publishing an editorial in a top-5 international medical journal. In her BMJ editorial, “Spinal interventions for chronic back pain: Do negative findings demand action?” BMJ 2025;388:r179 doi.org/10.1136/bmj.r179 Published: 19 February 2025 Let’s examine her claim: ***Financial Conflicts of Interest for Jane Ballantyne*** 1. Paid Consultant for Law Firms Ballantyne has worked as a highly-paid consultant for Motley Rice, a law firm involved in opioid litigation, with potential to earn millions in consulting expert fees. She eventually disclosed this, years after she should have, in a revised statement to Annals of Internal Medicine in 2019, long after she had been working with them as early as 2012. Ballantyne previously served as a paid consultant for Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, another law firm engaged in opioid litigation, only disclosed to the CDC during the 2016 opioid guideline development. 2. Expert Witness in Opioid Litigation: She acted as a paid expert witness in opioid litigation lawsuits, a lucrative sideline for PROP members, with some earning up to $850/hour. Specific cases or total compensation not detailed in disclosures. 3. Non-Disclosure Issues plaguing Jane Ballantyne: Ballantyne has failed to report conflicts of interest in 84% of qualifying publications, despite being a section editor for a medical journal highly aware of ethical disclosure standards, standards she enforces for authors who seek to publish in the journal for which she is an editor. Co-authored articles (e.g., with Mark Sullivan) where litigation-related conflicts were not disclosed, requiring corrections. She did not disclose Motley Rice consultancy due to a confidentiality agreement; later revised disclosure after scrutiny. Here is her falsified form that she was later forced to correct: static1.squarespace.com/stat… Explaining away her failure to disclose, the journal said, “in a recent Ideas and Opinions commentary, Dr. Ballantyne did not disclose that she has received personal fees for the multidistrict opioid litigation because her consultancy in the litigation was under a confidentiality agreement. Dr. Ballantyne has now updated her disclosure because her role in the multidistrict litigation has since become public knowledge,” acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/… **The ethical standard for disclosing conflicts of interest is not that “your role was made public.” In the next post, I will detail what are the ethical requirements for disclosing conflict of interest is the ethical standard for disclosing complex of interest in academics:: 4. Recent X posts (2025) suggest Ballantyne may still be on retainer with Cohen Milstein, though this is unconfirmed by primary sources. 5. Ballantyne’s conflicts stem from her consultancy and expert witness roles in opioid litigation, compounded by inconsistent disclosure practices and her leadership in PROP, an advocacy group with aligned interests. Why do journals allow the PROP cartel to exert outside influence in legal, administrative, publishing, committee memberships, and media outlets, when they have been caught in repeated lies, failures to disclose relevant COIS (which continues to this day) as they manipulate and deceive journal readers, stakeholders, affected persons, and the journals themselves? Surely the @bmj_latest is better than this. @bmj_latest please investigate this issue.

BREAKING: The @AmerMedicalAssn has adopted the following policies at its 2026 #AMAmtg: "The AMA [will] convene a meeting with the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy and other national pharmacy organizations to identify ways to improve communications between physicians and pharmacists about physicians’ and pharmacists’ corresponding responsibility and related areas" about physicians' plenary prescriptive authority (including controlled medications), providing a report in June 2027.... The "AMA [will] work with pharmacies subject to the national opioid litigation settlements to provide data on refusals to fill and dispense medications, including the reasons for such refusals."

“World's largest opioid review finds they often don't work” 6/9/26 sciencedaily.com/releases/20… “Efficacy and Harms of Opioid Analgesics for Acute Pain: Overview of Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses.” Drugs, 2026; 86 (4) link.springer.com/article/10… @ibdgirl76 @ChadDKollas

Actually, what the authors (several of whom have financial connections to lawsuits against opioid manufacturers) conclude is exactly this: "Opioid analgesics are efficacious in reducing pain in some acute conditions." All pain care must be individualized. For some acutely painful conditions (musculoskeletal pain, for example), anti-inflammatory medications may be better choices (depending on patients' comorbidities, such as renal impairment). Several of these authors were involved in the deeply flawed @OPALstudy. There are underlying financial conflicts at issue. #DontDrinkTheKoolaid

Kentucky just passed a law allowing whistleblowers to pause organ harvesting when there are any signs of life: lifesitenews.com/analysis/ne…

One of the most striking features of this new framework is that pain is often described as a disorder of the brain when institutions wish to emphasize neuroplasticity, central sensitization, and the role of cognition and behavior in modulating suffering. In those moments, pain is supposedly treated as fully real, fully biological, and deeply embedded in the nervous system. However, when patients seek pharmacologic relief, the philosophy becomes entirely different, and the condition is suddenly approached as uniquely dangerous to treat through medication, as though the mere fact of pain’s subjectivity has rendered it less scientifically legitimate than other disorders of the same organ system. This is not a coherent scientific standard. It is a shaky epistemology and, perhaps even worse, a morally selective one. It therefore raises a profound question: why is pain treated as biologically real enough to psychologize and even moralize, but not biologically legitimate enough to medicate?

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