AMA Needs to Get Facts Right About Opioids
/By Pat Anson, Editor
This week the American Medical Association launched a new effort to combat prescription drug abuse in the U.S. The AMA is working with over two dozen state and national medical organizations to address what it calls the “opioid public health epidemic.”
While the effort and its goals are laudable, it was disappointing to see the AMA – the nation’s largest medical group -- announce them in a news release full of cliches and half-truths.
The news release began with this:
“With 44 people dying each day in the United States from an overdose of opioids, we physicians see people affected by this epidemic on a regular basis.”
The “44 people dying each day” figure comes from a CDC study of prescription drug overdoses, which found that in 2010 “opioid analgesics were involved in 16,651 deaths – far exceeding deaths from any other drug or drug class, licit or illicit.”
The CDC study is cited in virtually every press release, news conference and news story that relates to the issue of prescription drug abuse. Over 16,000 people dying from any cause is a serious problem and an attention getter. At face value, the numbers are frightening.
If only they were true.
As longtime patient advocate Janice Reynolds pointed out in a recent column for Pain News Network, the CDC’s numbers are seriously flawed.
“Unfortunately this study is quoted by many. If you say a tale often enough, it becomes a version of the truth,” Janice wrote. “The CDC study is based on a review of death certificates and didn’t sort out legitimate opioid prescriptions, illegal use of opioids, suicide, deaths caused by alcohol or other medications, or even if the death was truly from opioids and not from some other disease process.
“Did the patient die from lung cancer or opioid toxicity? Sometimes the latter is entered as the cause of death when it is not the case.”
A close reading of the CDC study also turns up something else. Other medications, particularly anti-depressants, sedatives, anti-anxiety and other mental health drugs, often were involved in the overdoses -- not just opioids.
To quote from the study:
“Opioids were frequently implicated in overdose deaths involving other pharmaceuticals. They were involved in the majority of deaths involving benzodiazepines (77.2%), anti-epileptic and anti-parkinsonism drugs (65.5%), anti-psychotic and neuroleptic drugs (58%), anti-depressants (57.6%), other analgesics, anti-pyretics, and anti-rheumatics (56.5%), and other psychotropic drugs (54.2%).
Why do we never hear about an “epidemic” of deaths from anti-depressants or sedatives? Because in all of the deaths involving multiple drugs, only opioids are singled out as the cause of death.
The CDC’s research is obviously flawed, yet --- like a bad zombie movie -- this five year old data has taken on a life of its own.
The Washington Post repeated the opioids “killed more than 16,000 people” mantra a few weeks ago. So did Drugwatch.com, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Forbes.
What about the 44 people dying every day? That zombie factoid was easy to find online in Deadline Detroit, the Magnolia Reporter and the Livingston Daily.
Like Janice Reynolds says, “If you say a tale often enough, it becomes a version of the truth.”
The tale would go away rather quickly if the CDC and other government organizations stopped repeating it or simply conducted a new overdose study with a better methodology. But the CDC seems more interested in keeping the zombie story alive.
Dr. Lynn Webster, a prominent pain physician, pointed out in a column last week that the CDC continues to use “fuzzy reporting” about opioids – raising questions about the agency’s impartiality.
“Given the concerns with accuracy of scientific reporting, is it reasonable to increase federal funding to the CDC to battle prescription opioid abuse, as requested? Only with an understanding of the real reasons for the current opioid problem can we solve the problem. Perhaps more dollars should instead go to the National Institutes of Health, which is in desperate need of more funding for pain research and to develop safer alternatives to opioids,” Webster wrote.
Opioid abuse, overdoses and overprescribing are serious problems. So is underprescribing and making opioids unavailable to people who truly need them.
How far has opioid hysteria gone? In a recent survey of pharmacists and drug wholesalers by the General Accounting Office (GAO), over half said DEA enforcement actions had limited their ability to supply drugs to legitimate patients. Many said they were fearful of being fined or having their licenses revoked. You won't see that story being reported in The New York Times or Los Angeles Times because the CDC and DEA aren't churning out press releases about it.
As Dr. Webster points out, if we’re truly going to address these complex problems, we better get our facts straight.
So should the American Medical Association.
