The abuse of hydrocodone (Vicoden) is a major problem. Compounding the addiction issue is the toxicity of the acetaminophen contained in the drug. Users consume many times the safe amounts of acetaminophen attempting to experience the euphoric effects of hydrocodone. Acetaminophen is hepato-toxic. It damages the liver, leading to irreversible liver damage and death. The dangers are increased with underlying conditions such as alcoholism, malnourishment or dehydration. These conditions can lower the toxic threshold of the drug. A tolerance is developed; the physical addiction to the hydrocodone in the drug causes the user to require a higher dose to achieve the same effect. This increase in acetaminophen levels leads to acute liver toxicity, causing liver necrosis and cell death. Acetaminophen poisoning is the leading cause of liver damage resulting in liver transplantation in Britain, and has replaced viral hepatitis as the leading cause of acute hepatic failure in the U.S.

Symptoms

When someone has overdosed on the following Opiates:  Opium; oxycontin, heroin; morphine; Suboxone, Methadone®; codeine, etc.

Treatment

Detox patients hooked on street drugs often addicted to legal meds first,  study found

(HealthDay News) – Prescription medicines are the way that many drug addicts first get hooked, making these legal medicines the new ”gateway” drugs, new study findings show.

University at Buffalo researchers interviewed 75 patients hospitalized for opioid detoxification and found that 31 of them said they first became addicted to legitimately prescribed painkillers.

Another 24 patients said their addiction began when they used a friend’s left-over prescription pills or stole drugs from a parent’s medicine cabinet, while the remaining 20 patients said they got hooked on street drugs.

But the study found that 92 percent of the patients said they eventually bought illegal drugs (usually heroin) because street drugs are less expensive and more effective than prescription drugs. Their reasons for continuing to use drugs included to feel “normal,” to feel “like a better person” or to ease emotional pain and stress.

“We are seeing an increase in the number of patients addicted to prescription drugs, so we wanted to better understand how they first got hooked,” study senior author Dr. Richard Blondell, a professor of family medicine, said in a University at Buffalo news release. ”This information suggests that there is a progressive nature to opioid use, and that prescription opioids can be the gateway to illicit drug addiction. It also tells us that people who use prescriptions illegally may be at greater risk for subsequent heroin use than those who use prescriptions legally.”

The study was published recently in the Journal of Addiction Medicine. The U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse has more about drug abuse and addiction.

– Robert Preidt

In this Peabody Award-winning edition of Vanguard, correspondent Mariana van Zeller travels to South Florida–the “Colombia of prescription drugs”–to expose a bustling pill pipeline that stretches from the beaches of Ft. Lauderdale to the rolling hills of Appalachia.

“The OxyContin Express” features intimate access with pill addicts, prisoners and law enforcement as each struggles with a lethal national epidemic.

Current.com

by The Press Association

Drug companies have been accused of conning the public by hyping up patented medicines with little new to offer while downplaying their side-effects.

An estimated 85% of new drugs offer few if any new benefits while having the potential to cause serious harm due to toxicity or misuse, a study has concluded.

The author of the research delivered a damning attack on “Big Pharma” at a meeting of sociology experts in the US.

Professor Donald Light described the pharmaceutical industry as a “market for lemons” – one in which the seller knows much more than the buyer about the product, and takes advantage of this fact.

“Sometimes drug companies hide or downplay information about serious side-effects of new drugs and overstate the drugs’ benefits,” said Prof Light, a professor of comparative health policy at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in New Jersey, US.

“Then, they spend two to three times more on marketing than on research to persuade doctors to prescribe these new drugs. Doctors may get misleading information and then misinform patients about the risks of a new drug. It’s really a two-tier market for lemons.”

He alleged that the pharmaceutical industry owned companies in charge of drug testing and provided “firewalls” of legal protection behind which information about dangers or lack of effectiveness could be be hidden.

Companies were assisted by the “relatively low bar” for effectiveness that had to be crossed to get a new drug approved, he claimed.

Prof Light presented his paper, entitled “Pharmaceuticals: A Two-Tier Market for Producing ‘Lemons’ and Serious Harm” at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia.

The study includes data gathered from independent reviewers which suggest that 85% of new drugs provide few, if any, new benefits.

As prescription drug abuse is on the rise, the Washington State Department of Health reports that overdoses have replaced car crashes as the leading cause of injury-related deaths. From 2003 to 2008, the rate of prescription overdoses and hospitalizations rose 90 percent.

The most prevalent drug overdose and death culprits appear to be Vicodin, Oxycontin and Methadone, all opiods. The overuse of Vicodin can lead to increased tolerance and addiction. One risk of Vicodin addiction includes liver toxicity, which increases for users without a tolerance to the drug. Oxycontin users may suffer from respiratory depression or arrest, skeletal-muscle flaccidity, blood-pressure and heart-rate reduction, coma and death.

As for Methadone, the FDA has issued a public health advisory warning that deaths and life-threatening side effects have been reported for both new users and those that switched to Methadone after being treated for pain with other strong narcotic pain relievers. The drug can cause slow or shallow breathing and change in heartbeat that may not be felt by the patient.

The trend of drug use has evolved since popular use of certain drugs each era – from LSD in the 1960s, heroin in the 1970s, crack cocaine in the 1980s, crystal meth in the 1990s to the current prescription drug abuse.

This year’s latest drug control strategy emphasizes anti-drug programs and encourages health care providers to screen for drug problems before addiction sets in, marking a change in policy. The policy requires early detection of patient drug use and database tracking of physicians that overprescribe addictive painkillers.

Policy reform also allocates drug control budget funds to a 13 percent increase in spending on alcohol and drug prevention programs. A 3.7 percent increase in addiction treatment was also approved for the budget.

The aim for policy reforms includes goals to reduce the rate of youth drug use and drug-induced deaths by 15 percent, and drug use among young adults by 10 percent. The administration also hopes to reduce the number of chronic drug users by 15 percent.

Approximately 70% of our patients are addicted to opiates for pain management and the majority are on opiates due to back pain. Back pain is one of the most common reasons people see a pain management doctor and start on opiate drugs. Up to 80% of the world’s population will suffer from back pain at some point in their lives, with the lower back as the most common location of pain.

Although most episodes of low back pain last less than two weeks, research has shown that recurrence rates for low back pain can reach as high as 50% in the first few months following an initial episode or injury.

While it is difficult to resolve lower back pain, the use of acupuncture has increased dramatically in the past few decades. Placebo-controlled studies have validated it as a reliable method of pain relief. The results of a recent study published in the Clinical Journal of Pain provide further proof that acupuncture is a safe and effective procedure for low-back pain, and that it can maintain positive outcomes for periods of six months or longer. Seeking acupuncture therapy may be an answer to relieving pain without the use of opiates that can have many negative side-effects and cause addiction.

Study Shows Many People Who Are Told They Have the Disorder Don’t Meet Standard Criteria

By Charlene Laino
WebMD Health News
Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD

Many people who have been told by their doctors that they have bipolar disorder don’t really have it.

So say researchers who used a standardized, comprehensive, psychiatric diagnostic interview to evaluate 700 adult psychiatric outpatients.

About 20% had previously been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. But only 13% met the criteria, says Mark Zimmerman, MD, associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University in Providence and practicing psychiatrist at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence.

“In about half of patients previously diagnosed with bipolar disorder, we couldn’t confirm the diagnosis,” he tells WebMD.

There are real dangers to overdiagnosis, chief among them unnecessary exposure to mood stabilizers and all their powerful side effects, Zimmerman says. There’s also the stigmatization of having a serious, possibly lifelong mental illness.

The study is being published online by the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry and presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association.

Why Is Bipolar Disorder Overdiagnosed?

Bipolar disorder used to be called manic depression because it is characterized by bouts of depression and bouts of mania. Patients experience dramatic mood swings between euphoria and severe depression; they may have hallucinations or delusions.

Patients with anxiety, agitation, irritability, and restlessness that does not persist are sometimes misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder, Zimmerman says.

“These could be symptoms of bipolar disorder. But they really have to be accompanied by other criteria, such as hyperactivity, feeling energetic despite just a few hours of sleep, or inflated self-esteem,” he says.

Ironically, one reason the disorder is being overdiagnosed is “because so much has been written about it being under-recognized,” Zimmerman says.

“It’s difficult to go to a lecture on bipolar disorder that doesn’t begin with, ‘Make sure you don’t miss…,’” he says. “So clinicians are loathe to miss it.”

The increased availability of medications for the treatment of bipolar disorder may also play a role in overdiagnosis, Zimmerman says. “Physicians have a tendency to diagnose something that they feel they are comfortable treating,” he says.

So what should you do if you think you’ve been misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder?

“If you’re at all uncertain about the diagnosis, speak to your doctor and make sure you understand why you’ve been given that diagnosis. If you remain unconvinced, get a second opinion,” Zimmerman says.

A Note from Rapid Drug Detox

According to several researchers, marketing tactics by the drug industry are contributing to a huge overdiagnosis of bipolar disorder.  Studies have shown evidence that fewer than half of patients who were given a diagnosis of the disorder actually had it, as reported in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. Their finding contradicts previous claims that the illness was underdiagnosed. Results from this study suggest that bipolar disorder is being overdiagnosed, and, given the serious side effects that the treatments can cause, patients need to be aware of this.

The psychiatric and pharmaceutical industry compare psychiatric disorders such as Bi-Polar Disorder, Depression, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD/ADHD), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, etc. to medical conditions such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease. However, no scientific tests can verify the medical existence of psychiatric disorders.

The psychiatric industry claims that there are certain medical conditions that exist without verifiable tests, therefore there does not exist one for mental illnesses. While there may exist rare medical conditions without verifiable medical tests, there are no psychiatric disorders that can be verified medically as a physical abnormality or disease.

Often brain scans used to prove schizophrenia or depression have not been conducted on people not taking antipsychotic drugs. Such scans have been documented to cause brain atrophy, or shrinkage. Other brain scans have compared brains of smaller children to show smaller brains in comparison to larger and older children. The scans were used to claim that children with ADHD have smaller brains. However, none have been conclusively proven to verify mental disorders as abnormalities of the brain.

This is not to say that people don’t get depressed, troubled, or even sometimes act psychotic.  For example, can soldiers returning from war experience extreme and often debilitating stress?  Yes, but it is less likely to be a medical condition of the brain. Can mothers become distraught after a joyous occasion such as the birth of a child?  Yes, but again, it is unlikely to be a brain abnormality or mental disease.  It may not be the best decision to prescribe these people certain drugs documented by international regulatory agencies to cause mania, psychosis, worsening depression, heart attack, stroke and sudden death.  Additionally, new or nursing mothers may risk birth defects or damage to infants from prescription drugs.

Any drug taken influences behavior or mood, whether it be cocaine, alcohol, marijuana or heroin. This does not mean someone who acts or feels differently on cocaine does so because they had a cocaine imbalance, with which the cocaine then corrected. It means that drugs change moods, emotions and behavior.  But while the illicit use of drugs is universally frowned upon, psychiatric drugs are conversely viewed as “good” drugs, despite the fact many are more addictive than cocaine or heroin. Drug addiction leads to the greater issues of drug abuse and withdrawal.

The larger problem is that the biological drug model prevents governments from allocating funding to actual medical solutions to people experiencing difficulty.  There are also viable, non-harmful medical treatments that do not receive government funding because the psychiatric/pharmaceutical industry spends much of its budget on advertising and lobbying efforts.

Opiate drug addiction can cause depression and many patients are prescribed antidepressants by psychiatrists. A blind study in 1998, whose findings were reinforced by landmark research in The Journal of the American Medical Association last month, concludes that antidepressant drugs thought to help with depression are not as effective as once thought. More studies being conducted suggest that benefits are often not much more effective than placebos.

Patients on a placebo improved about 75 percent as much as those on drugs. Yoga, relaxation imaging, meditation, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and other forms of therapy can help combat this debilitating illness.

Most common side effects of antidepressant therapy include sexual problems, drowsiness, sleep difficulties, anxiety, nervousness and nausea. While some side effects may go away after the first few weeks of drug treatment, others can persist and progressively get worse.

In adults over the age of 65, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors pose an additional concern. Studies show that SSRI medications may increase the risk for falls, fractures, and bone loss in older adults. The SSRIs can also cause serious withdrawal symptoms if you stop taking them abruptly. Once you’ve started taking antidepressants, stopping can be difficult; many people have withdrawal symptoms that make it difficult to get off of the medication and may require opiate detox.

If you decide to stop taking antidepressants, it’s essential to taper off slowly. If you stop abruptly, you may experience a number of unpleasant withdrawal symptoms such as crying spells, extreme restlessness, depression, anxiety, dizziness, fatigue, and aches and pains. These withdrawal symptoms are known as antidepressant discontinuation syndrome. Antidepressant discontinuation syndrome is especially common with Paxil or Zoloft. However, all medications for depression can cause withdrawal symptoms.