Day: 03/20/2015
Richard Cordray, my hero
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-20/bank-customers-may-get-their-day-in-court
Mandatory arbitration clauses were created by corporate lawyers about 15 years ago and buried in the fine print of credit card contracts and checking account agreements. But they may not live much longer following the March 10 publication of a three-year study by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The 728-page report confirmed what consumer advocacy groups have long argued: Mandatory arbitration doesn’t much help customers but does prevent expensive lawsuits against banks. The bureau was required to complete the report under the Dodd-Frank Act prior to issuing new regulations. “Now that our study has been completed, we will consider what next steps are appropriate,” said CFPB Director Richard Cordray in a statement…
The bureau can count on supporters who have successfully fought off efforts to defang it since its creation in 2010. Those include Senator Al Franken. The Minnesota Democrat has for years railed against forced arbitration clauses not only in consumer finance agreements but also in employment, mobile phone, and cable-TV contracts…
Faces of Lawsuit Abuse
http://www.facesoflawsuitabuse.org/
Oil Industry Meets First Federal Fracking Rules With a Lawsuit
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deborah-sweeney/how-small-businesses-can-_1_b_3455172.html
Patent trolls are some of the biggest drains on American business — they tie up time, resources, and, according to a 2011 study by Boston University, cost American businesses $29 Billion in that year alone…
http://www.medscape.com/features/content/6006313
10/2/2014, All-Time Craziest Frivolous Lawsuits
Physicians have long complained about frivolous malpractice lawsuits. The assault on their reputations and the emotional upheaval they face can be traumatic even when the lawsuit is obviously fraudulent…
Experienced plaintiffs’ attorneys say that they must spend $50,000-$75,000 in expenses long before trial to secure and review medical records and expert testimony. “We can’t afford to file frivolous cases,” said Armand Leone, MD, a radiologist and attorney in Glen Rock, New Jersey. “We’d go out of business.”
Although frivolous cases have declined significantly, they still exist, and some are truly outrageous…
http://www.tortreformtruth.com/fact-vs-fiction/frivolous-lawsuits/
Despite popular opinion, statistics show that America doesn’t have a frivolous lawsuit problem. The Rand Institute for Civil Justice, one of the most respected think tanks in the nation, found that only 10 percent of injured people seek compensation and only 2 percent of them file lawsuits. The Rand Institute also found that since 1991, tort cases reflected only six percent of all cases filed…
The frivolous lawsuit myth is an invention of big business. Corporations and insurance companies, though selective and sometimes entirely false reports, have framed several legitimate lawsuits as frivolous and an abuse of our courts. Through a relentless and well-funded public relations campaign, big business has transformed civil cases into urban myths that propagate the frivolous lawsuit myth…
11/14/2013, House approves automatic fines for filing frivolous lawsuits
The legislation is an attempt to discourage frivolous legal actions that Republicans say tie up thousands of hours and millions of dollars for companies each year…
http://www.medmalfacts.com/facts-and-myths/
On average, 97 percent of medical negligence claims have merit. Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health examined over 1,400 closed medical negligence claims and found that 97 percent were meritorious. Of those 1,400 claims, 80 percent involved death or serious injury. The study concluded that “portraits of a malpractice system that is stricken with frivolous litigation are overblown.”
Only one in eight people injured by medical negligence file a malpractice claim. According to the Institute of Medicine, 98,000 patients die each year as a result of preventable medical errors, and hundreds of thousands more suffer non-fatal injuries. Despite the massive number of medical injuries, medical malpractice lawsuits are uncommon, constituting only three percent of the civil tort caseload…
On average, just 6 percent of doctors are responsible for nearly 60 percent of all malpractice payments…
A Life Unworthy of Life
http://robertmgoldstein.com/category/photography-and-art/2015-blog-for-mental-health/
America’s history in the eugenics movement is just as shameful as our history of slavery. I say it’s our “history” because slavery and eugenics are no longer around. Or are they?
The drug war is just like slavery, only we now put black and brown people behind bars (where they work for prison contractors for very little pay). The prison industry provides economic benefits to the cities and states where prisons are located, just like rich plantation owners provided to the societies they lived in. Without the slaves (prisons), how would these communities survive?
And certainly modern day slavery includes working in coal mines, and maybe even having to work in a cubicle all day. We are all slaves to money — you can’t live without it. Yes, we are also slaves to consumerism, but perhaps that’s changing. (Okay, maybe not.)
You could look at the social programs in America today and easily compare them to the eugenics of our past — just like Robert has done in the linked post. If you slap a different name on it, like the drug war for slavery, that doesn’t change the results. Death is death, whether you die in a prison camp or because you can’t afford to pay for cancer treatment. A prison is a prison, whether it’s political, economic, from chronic pain, or because of the color of your skin or your gender.
The differences in how the medical industry treats physical and mental health could easily be seen as a eugenics-type program. The excuse that we don’t understand mental health as well as physical health is bogus. There are plenty of things that science hasn’t figured out about physical health and disease, yet it continues to treat all conditions it can give a name to. And we’ve known for a long time about the connection between the mind and the body — it is impossible to separate them, they are one and the same.
This is what the American Medical Association said in 1994:
“Withholding or Withdrawing Life-Sustaining Medical Treatment. The social commitment of the physician is to sustain life and relieve suffering. Where the performance of one duty conflicts with the other, the preferences of the patient should prevail…
As far as I can tell, the AMA still uses this language. And yet for pain patients, it appears this language does not apply. Relieve suffering? Preferences of the patient? Perhaps this language only applies for end-of-life care. If your medical condition is terminal, you get to choose your treatment options; if your condition is chronic, the DEA gets to choose.
For a patient who is terminal, and suffering horribly, the role of the physician as “healer” is no longer attainable…
For a chronic pain patient who is suffering horribly, the role of the physician as “healer” is no longer attainable.
Perhaps a brand new specialty should be created for treating pain. If doctors aren’t going to prescribe the medications that work, what are we paying them to do? Hold our hands?
The current specialty of pain management and rehabilitation is outdated and woefully inadequate. (Woefully.) Patients aren’t respected in this system and have no rights. The DEA gets to decide which treatments are allowed and doctors have to submit to the DEA, leaving patients with fewer and fewer options for treatments that work.
Pain patients should create their own treatment specialties, just like former alcoholics are now addiction treatment counselors and experts. If there were more addiction treatment programs that didn’t rely on AA-like beliefs, maybe there would be more former alcoholics who were using programs that provided all available treatment options. And maybe the outlook for people who suffer from addiction would be a little bit better. It would be nice to create something like that for pain patients.
Not medical care, not health care, but pain care.
The Proverbial Fig Leaf
“I never leaf through a copy of National Geographic without realizing how lucky we are to live in a society where it is traditional to wear clothes.” Erma Bombeck
Every Leaf Is A Flower
“Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” Albert Camus
“If we need the Earth to survive but we’re destroying it, are we committing suicide?” Internet meme
Try engaging your senses…
https://myspanglishfamilia.wordpress.com/2015/03/20/magnolia-grandiflora-on-depression-joy-part-ii/
If you want to get out of your mind, quell the negative and destructive thoughts, try engaging your senses…
The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous
Nowhere in the field of medicine is treatment less grounded in modern science. A 2012 report by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University compared the current state of addiction medicine to general medicine in the early 1900s, when quacks worked alongside graduates of leading medical schools. The American Medical Association estimates that out of nearly 1 million doctors in the United States, only 582 identify themselves as addiction specialists. (The Columbia report notes that there may be additional doctors who have a subspecialty in addiction.) Most treatment providers carry the credential of addiction counselor or substance-abuse counselor, for which many states require little more than a high-school diploma or a GED. Many counselors are in recovery themselves. The report stated: “The vast majority of people in need of addiction treatment do not receive anything that approximates evidence-based care.”
This begs the question: Dr. Kolodny, are you a drug addict in recovery?
Alcoholics Anonymous was established in 1935, when knowledge of the brain was in its infancy…
A meticulous analysis of treatments, published more than a decade ago in The Handbook of Alcoholism Treatment Approaches but still considered one of the most comprehensive comparisons, ranks AA 38th out of 48 methods…
AA truisms have so infiltrated our culture that many people believe heavy drinkers cannot recover before they “hit bottom.” Researchers I’ve talked with say that’s akin to offering antidepressants only to those who have attempted suicide, or prescribing insulin only after a patient has lapsed into a diabetic coma…
Part of the problem is our one-size-fits-all approach…
Sinclair called this the alcohol-deprivation effect, and his laboratory results, which have since been confirmed by many other studies, suggested a fundamental flaw in abstinence-based treatment: going cold turkey only intensifies cravings. This discovery helped explain why relapses are common…
I didn’t mention that some bare-bones facilities charge as much as $40,000 a month and offer no treatment beyond AA sessions led by minimally qualified counselors…
In 1934, just after Prohibition’s repeal, a failed stockbroker named Bill Wilson staggered into a Manhattan hospital. Wilson was known to drink two quarts of whiskey a day, a habit he’d attempted to kick many times. He was given the hallucinogen belladonna, an experimental treatment for addictions, and from his hospital bed he called out to God to loosen alcohol’s grip. He reported seeing a flash of light and feeling a serenity he had never before experienced. He quit booze for good. The next year, he co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous…
Alcohol acts on many parts of the brain, making it in some ways more complex than drugs like cocaine and heroin, which target just one area of the brain. Among other effects, alcohol increases the amount of GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid), a chemical that slows down activity in the nervous system, and decreases the flow of glutamate, which activates the nervous system. (This is why drinking can make you relax, shed inhibitions, and forget your worries.) Alcohol also prompts the brain to release dopamine, a chemical associated with pleasure…
Still, science can’t yet fully explain why some heavy drinkers become physiologically dependent on alcohol and others don’t, or why some recover while others f[l]ounder…
What if it’s in the tastebuds? Part of the reason some people don’t drink is because of the taste of alcohol, which could be described as an “acquired” taste. And one reason some people love beer and wine is because, to them, they taste good. But people like different foods and have different tastes — I dunno, there seems to be some kind of connection there…
There is no mandatory national certification exam for addiction counselors. The 2012 Columbia University report on addiction medicine found that only six states required alcohol- and substance-abuse counselors to have at least a bachelor’s degree and that only one state, Vermont, required a master’s degree. Fourteen states had no license requirements whatsoever—not even a GED or an introductory training course was necessary—and yet counselors are often called on by the judicial system and medical boards to give expert opinions on their clients’ prospects for recovery…
“What’s wrong,” he asked me rhetorically, “with people with no qualifications or talents—other than being recovering alcoholics—being licensed as professionals with decision-making authority over whether you are imprisoned or lose your medical license? …
Reid K. Hester, a psychologist and the director of research at Behavior Therapy Associates, an organization of psychologists in Albuquerque…
It seems like New Mexico is a state where all forms of treatment for addiction can be found, and yet that hasn’t made the problems of alcohol and drug addiction any better. I guess it all comes down to affordability and easy access to treatment, along with the biases some patients have about their own addictions. Of course, sustainable jobs is one of the only things that really makes a difference in how people use and abuse drugs.
5 Things You Should Know About Chronic Pain
https://edsinfo.wordpress.com/2015/03/20/5-things-you-should-know-about-chronic-pain/
It means that chronic pain often needs to be treated as the primary problem, which is different than the conventional medical approach of identifying and treating the underlying problem causing the pain…
This is very important, but it’s not only doctors and the medical industry that need to treat chronic pain as the primary problem — insurance companies, including Medicare and the VA, need to cover all of the treatments that support this fact.
Marijuana research doesn’t support legalization, public health advocates say
I don’t need to respond to most of the inaccuracies in this article because the almost 800 posted comments did it for me.
http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2015/03/marijuana_research_doesnt_supp.html
Marijuana is the second most treated substance in Ohio addiction treatment programs…
That’s probably true, but is the reason for that statistic because pot smokers are forced to submit to addiction treatment programs? Or maybe the reason they are in the program is because they’re addicted to stronger drugs than bud?
From a 6/9/2014 Vice article: “Ohio gubernatorial candidate Ed FitzGerald, a Democrat, proclaimed that users of heroin were not being punished severely enough.”
Under comments:
Duncan20903 11 hours ago
Q) Tell me Mr. Prohibitionist, how many prohibitionists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A) None. We don’t have enough scientific studies to know whether or not we should screw in the light bulb, or how we would go about doing it, or even know if it’s possible to screw one in! No, we can’t risk giving the scientists any light bulbs that are more than 25 watts to use for scientific studies. They might get into the wrong hands!
Consumers getting ‘skinned’ by health insurers
http://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/03/16/16905/consumers-getting-skinned-health-insurers
Out-of-pocket costs have increased 100 percent or more in most states since 2003, according to The Commonwealth Fund, which also has been following this trend. And while this has been going on, premiums have been going through the roof. The average premium for an employer-sponsored plan nearly tripled between 1999 and 2014, from $5,791 to $16,834. And lest you think Obamacare is to blame, some of the biggest annual increases occurred during the decade before the Affordable Care Act was passed…
All Things Chronic 