Patients wrongfully labeled by Ameritox drug tests

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread1067106/pg12

Ameritox Urine Drug Test has destroyed my doctor/patient relationship… literally.

When I asked why the sudden change.. She told me the DEA told the Doc he no longer had to take insurance if he didn’t want to.. Mongths later I still haven’t gotten a clear answer..but my yearly doc expenses went from $600 to $2,400.. Not including medicine costs..

My insurance has been covering my health care (office visits, blood-work, mammograms, scripts, etc) for years without too much grief, but it sure did put the $1300 Ameritox charge in the ‘not covered’ category…

a reply to: annoyedpharmacist
My doctor had to have another doctor shadow him for six months because he was being punished for not giving patients enough warning that the medication they’re taking could lead to addiction. I was floored.who doesn’t know that in this day and age? He admitted it would affect his prescription writing habits in the future. We made a joke about it but I felt really bad for the stress it clearly put him under. He said he would have to stop assuming his patients are rational thoughtful adults. How does a town handle losing that many doctors?

From a court case in 2012: Millennium Labs vs. Ameritox

Ameritox’s nearly decade-long practice of using false claims and advertising practices to mislead physicians into believing they could use the Rx Guardian service to determine whether their patients were taking the proper dosage of their prescribed medications, leading to damaging outcomes for patients and their physicians.”

Essentially, the two Rx Guardian systems did not do what Ameritox claimed and, consequently, patients could have been wrongfully labeled as adherent or nonadherent based on quantitative Rx Guardian ranges. In some cases, patient test results could have been erroneously recorded in physicians’ records as reflecting aberrant behaviors, when in fact the patient was taking medications exactly as prescribed…

He was asked, “Dr. Leider, you would agree with me that Rx Guardian cannot determine the dosage of a medication that a patient has taken; isn’t that correct?” He answered, “Yes.”
Leider was then asked, “And you would agree with me that Rx Guardian cannot determine the frequency with which a patient actually is taking a prescribed medication; isn’t that correct?” he answered, “Yes.”

Moreover, Dr. Leider conceded that patients who were excluded from Ameritox’s “Compliance Database” could in fact be compliant with their regimens, while those abusing or misusing their medications could actually be included…

(5/15/2015) tigertatzen said:  Talked to one of my friends who’s an ER doc last night and he said there have been so many people being dumped by their physicians that it’s starting to impact ED medicine in a very significant way. Patients have nowhere else to go get seen. He said there has been talk of certain Schedule II meds not being authorized for dispensation by ERs or 24-hour clinics anymore and Adderall is one of them. He said they’re also being told that Tramadol is probably going to be reclassed as a narcotic too…far too many people over-prescribing and prescribing for long-term use when it was not meant to be a maintenance med. He said they’re cracking down on Phenergan too. Good grief!