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[Chaplain]

Short intro:

My wife has been disabled since 2011: her stomach became paralyzed and hasn't been able to eat any solid food ever since. Due to all of her surgeries and reproductive problems, she has been on pain killers since 2011. However, now she is being forced to come off her pain killers that have always been prescribed to her by her pain management doctor because of the CDC's new guidelines given by our government this year. This also has happened to someone we know at our church who is in the last stages of Cancer and had them removed because of these new guidelines. This means because of these new guidelines people that need pain killers are being forced to come off of them.

Now it turns out that there is another reason for this. It turns out that there are shortages of prescription drugs in the United States. Doctors are now having to choose who will suffer (like my wife) and who will be pain free. Just sharing this because of the severity of what is going on.

Drug Shortages Forcing Hard Decisions on Rationing Treatments

Such shortages are the new normal in American medicine. But the rationing that results has been largely hidden from patients and the public.

Some institutions have formal committees that include ethicists and patient representatives; in other places, individual physicians, pharmacists and even drug company executives decide which patients receive a needed drug — and which do not.

An international group of pediatric cancer specialists was so troubled about the profession’s unsystematic approach to distributing scarce medicine that it developed rationing guidelines that are being released Friday in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute. “It was painful,” said Dr. Yoram Unguru, an oncologist at the Children’s Hospital at Sinai in Baltimore and a faculty member at the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. “We kept coming back to wow, we’ve got that tragic choice: two kids in front of you, you only have enough for one. How do you choose?”

Dr. Eric Kodish, a children’s cancer doctor who heads the Cleveland Clinic’s center for ethics, humanities and spiritual care, said patients should be told. “It’s their bodies and their lives that are on the line.”

Indeed, Beverly Smith, a Cleveland patient who has Crohn’s disease, said she had no idea that an important ingredient had been removed from the daily intravenous nutritional treatments she depends on until she developed side effects from the deficiency. “Why didn’t anybody tell me?” she asked.

Another company, Jazz Pharmaceuticals, recently consulted a small group of oncologists to recommend how to allocate its cancer drug, Erwinase, if it ever became necessary. “Who deserves the drug more than anyone else?” said Dr. Wendy Stock, a leukemia specialist at the University of Chicago Medicine, who participated in the discussion. “We gave them some guidelines on that. ”

Dr. Kamal Pohar, a urologist at Ohio State University’s cancer hospital, said he remembered driving home, wondering if he was making the right calls for his patients. “I can still feel the stress,” he said. “I’ve never been faced with this.” Supplies of BCG are again adequate, Merck and doctors report.

 

[spock]

Wow, didnt know any of this. My pain management Dr. has been reducing my meds the last few months, which i havent been a fan of. Hes aiming to have try nucenta very soon as an alternative. I been on these for 8 years...

 

[Chaplain]

Wow, didnt know any of this. My pain management Dr. has been reducing my meds the last few months, which i haven't been a fan of. Hes aiming to have try nucenta very soon as an alternative. I been on these for 8 years...

Nucenta was given to my wife a few years ago and it caused memory loss. I noticed that she couldn't remember conversations from the day before and that freaked me out. She immediately came off of it. I would recommend looking at the side effects before taking any new drug.