I am not in the least surprised.<p>The government has been cracking down on opioids, such crackdowns are never nuanced and will of course hit the ones that stand out, justified or not.<p>Until the people collecting the data are made accountable for problems with the system this sort of garbage will occur--and it's far more harmful when it's medical rather than just credit scores.<p>The doctors & pharmacies don't really have a choice here--do the medically right thing and you risk your license and maybe even your freedom.<p>Some years back locally we had a case that obviously related to this, but the news reporting barely touched on it. Murder-suicide, a cancer? patient denied adequate pain management took his doctor with him. Of course the true perpetrators at the DEA don't face any such repercussions.
Aside from the Big Brother factor this is terrible medicine. The best practice for an opiate addict is, very often, to get them on a stabilised prescription supply to minimise the risk of overdose. Rapid changes in effective dose should be avoided outside of an inpatient setting. (If you cold turkey an outpatient addict -- or even a non-addict in serious pain -- then don't be too surprised if they're dead from a heroin overdose within 48 hours.) This system creates the exact opposite outcomes.
The War On Pain Relief sucks in so many ways. News orgs that parrot Gov/Leo anti-opioid narratives - w/o any analysis at all - aren't helping.<p>In FL, Opioid Rx are limited to 3 days and the politics behind that pushes Drs to not Rx opioids under any circumstances.<p>Cases in point: I was recently Rx'd Tylenol after emergency abdominal surgery - had to convince the Dr just to Rx Tramadol. This is everywhere now. Under-medicating patients with OTC analgesics is the new normal for hospitals/ERs.<p>I've a friend who responsibly took opioids for years to mitigate his (visibly) advanced rheumatoid arthritis. Within a year of the 3-day law passing, Drs in his network ended opioid Rxs. The (now fewer) pain management Drs are over capacity and not accepting new patients. What pain relief he can manage isn't thru Drs.<p>So, yeah. Thanks Opioid Hysteria for forcing desperate people in pain toward less safe alternatives.
> Appriss says that it is “very rare” for pets’ prescriptions to drive up a patient’s NarxCare scores.<p>What a bullshit response. There's not even an acknowledgement that this is a bad thing, let alone any attempt to fix it.
Ok that sucks, and just lik credit scores, should be banned. Driving? Maybe. Theft? Maybe. But healthcare is present in the lives of everyone, and eventually someone has to take a pill. Discrimination by prescription.
Jesus, it's like every paragraph introduces a new case of "what the hell were they thinking?" Something like this being would have required thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people to all make a multitude of terrible decisions based off absurd assumptions.