Day: 02/26/2015

Why testosterone is the drug of the future

http://fusion.net/story/42619/why-testosterone-is-the-drug-of-the-future/?src=longreads

After his personal success, Cenegenics asked if he’d like to take their training course, so he did, and quickly, he found himself switching specialties and business models. He became a testosterone doctor.

Just like doctors who now treat addiction…

Clinics like his don’t work like most doctors’ offices do, where they are limited by what insurance companies will pay for. This is an all-cash business. The initial session costs $5,000, and the monthly charges are over $1,000. Clients get their blood work done every three months, so that Campion can keep tabs on how their “hormonal balancing” is going. Most patients lock into a permanent testosterone regimen, as Campion has. “I will take testosterone for the rest of my life,” he says…

What pain clinics will look like in the future… Access to treatment will be out of reach for most patients.

In 2013, 14,000 kilograms of testosterone were sold in the United States. That might not sound like much, but a typical adult male has just 0.000000035 kilograms of testosterone floating around in his bloodstream. There is a lot of extra T in the hormonal composition of the country—and it only accounts for the legal sales…

Can we correlate this to an increase in violence over this time period?  Are environmental scientists testing for this drug in our water, food, and waste?

Campion, for one, insists that his testosterone clinic is meant to promote well-being, not to cure disease, even though he uses the tools of medicine…

Is testosterone an anti-depressant?  I wonder if it could treat addiction…

This emergent industry is not primarily composed of high-end, coastal practices like Campion’s. Low-T business startups are blooming across the country, many run by entrepreneurial doctors who did not specialize in endocrinology, urology, or any related subfield…

This sounds so similar to the addiction industry, just on a smaller scale.  I predict that in the future, doctors selling testosterone will outnumber those selling addiction treatments.

The sheer fact that properties of “manhood” can be conferred by an injection should destabilize our notion of how fixed in our bodies and identities we are…

So true.

And my final questions is, does testosterone treat chronic pain?  Maybe for men only?  As a woman, I don’t think I’d be interested in trying it.

What an interesting article, gracias Mr. Madrigal.

7/23/2013, Medicaid Coverage Limits Access To Medications For Painkiller Addicts

http://kaiserhealthnews.org/news/medicaid-coverage-for-painkiller-addiction/

A report commissioned by the American Society of Addiction Medicine found that Medicaid agencies in just 28 states cover all three of medications that the Food and Drug Administration has approved for opioid addiction treatment: methadone, buprenorphine and naltrexone. The study also found that most state Medicaid agencies, even those that cover all three medications, place restrictions on getting them by requiring prior authorization and re-authorization, imposing lifetime limitations and tapering dosage strengths. The study was done by the substance abuse research firm Avisa Group…

Click to access the-evidence-against-methadone-as-a-preferred-analgesic.pdf

The Evidence Against Methadone as a “Preferred” Analgesic: A Position Statement from the American Academy of Pain Medicine (2014)

The use of methadone as an analgesic for severe chronic pain has expanded in recent years.
It is effective for some patients, but has unique pharmacologic properties that call for
caution and expertise in administering it. Methadone shows up in mortality reports with
greater frequency than should be expected given the small number of prescriptions written
compared with other opioids. Despite this evidence of risk, most states have designated
methadone as a preferred analgesic, presumably because its low cost results in savings for
publicly-funded health plans…

While Medicaid pushes methadone on pain patients, it rarely allows this drug’s use to treat addiction.  The result is poisonings and deaths in pain patients, and the deaths of those who suffer from addiction because they had to choose other drugs for treatment (usually illegal ones).

OK BOP member doesn’t care if chronic pain gets treated?

Hydrocodone no longer Oklahoma’s top prescribed drug

http://www.pharmaciststeve.com/?p=9456

The main reason that hydrocodone is no longer being prescribed is because they closed down more than 250 pain clinics in Oklahoma:

https://painkills2.wordpress.com/2015/01/21/1282014-addicted-oklahoma-profiting-from-pain/

Other reasons include PDMPs:

http://oklahomawatch.org/2014/05/02/drug-overdoses-fall-in-states-with-required-prescription-checks/

5/2/2014, Narcotic Prescriptions Fall in States With Required ‘Doctor-Shopping’ Checks

The full roster of controlled dangerous substances includes dozens of drugs that are not highly addictive and rarely pose overdose risks, such as hormone supplements. King said it would make sense to exclude those from the mandatory check roster.

Oklahoma doctors also want to ensure that any new legislation authorizes physician staff members to run PMP checks, he said. Existing law does not explicitly do so.

In addition, the association wants enforcement of the PMP check requirements to be shifted from the state narcotics bureau to the medical licensing boards that already oversee doctors’ professional practices…

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20837287

(2010) Increase in unintentional medication overdose deaths: Oklahoma, 1994-2006.

Methadone was associated with the highest number of deaths per equianalgesic dose sold (23.3), whereas hydrocodone and oxycodone had the highest increases in deaths per equianalgesic dose sold (threefold increase each)…

Another reason there’s not as much hydrocodone being prescribed:

http://oklahomawatch.org/2013/12/18/the-silent-march-of-suicide/

12/18/2013, The Silent March of Suicide

On most days in Oklahoma, one to six people kill themselves. In 2013, at least 617 people committed suicide in the state, far more than homicides.

Homicides get all of the headlines and news footage. Suicides take place invisibly, cloaked in shame, fear of intruding on privacy, fear of inspiring others to take their own lives. Mental-health experts, however, call out almost in anguish for more attention to be paid to the problem, especially in a state with one of the nation’s highest suicide rates…

Oklahoma Watch invites you to look through a list below of 2013 suicides recorded by the Oklahoma Office of the Chief Medical Examiner — not as an analytical exercise, but as a reminder of the constant, often only ritually and privately acknowledged toll of lost lives, which experts say is preventable…

2/4/13 Inola, Acute Combined Drug Toxicity (Alprazolam, Ethanol)

2/5/13 El Reno, Mixed Drug Toxicity (Ethanol, Tramadol, Morphine, Amantadine)

2/13/13 Bartlesville, Probable Complications Of Acute Drug Toxicity (Verapamil) [blood pressure]

2/13/13 McAlester, Acute Drug Toxicity (Doxepin) [anti-depressant]

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Waiting

“If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you’ll never enjoy the sunshine.” Morris West

“Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.”  Amy Winehouse

“The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”  Bertrand Russell

“A lot of people are waiting for Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi to come back – but they are gone. We are it. It is up to us. It is up to you.”  Marian Wright Edelman

“When you’re getting ready to launch into space, you’re sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen.”  Sally Ride

“I keep waiting to meet a man who has more balls than I do.”  Salma Hayek

(Photo taken 2/25/2015)