Yesterday, while I was poring over the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, I found an interesting report about the proliferation of opioid painkillers during the past decade. I found that the focus of this Journal Sentinel investigation was the way in which pharmaceutical companies, physicians and lobby groups have become financially entangled. Pharmaceutical companies have been funding pain medicine advocacy organizations and providing “continuing education” for doctors, which is medicalese for drug advertising. Over the past decade, sales of prescription painkillers have quadrupled. However, according to some dissenting voices in the medical community, the liberal use of these opioid pain medications still lacks the support of rigorous science.
The Madison-based Univeristy of Wisconsin Pain & Policy Studies Group featured prominently in this Journal Sentinel report. UW Pain’s motto is “improving global pain relief by achieving balanced access to opioids worldwide,” a goal that seems noble enough, but over the past decade, the organization has accepted more than $2.5 million from pharmaceutical companies such as DesignWrite, Cephalon and Purdue Pharma for signing off on the safety of their drugs.
Two of UW Pain’s most prominent voices aren’t even physicians – Aaron Gilson has a Ph.D. in social welfare, and David Joranson has a master’s degree in social work. UW Pain’s apparent lack of medical expertise, and the large sums of money it has received from drug companies, put its advocacy of “balanced access to opioids” on questionable footing.
If you have had a painful health complication in the past 10 years, odds are you’ve experienced the painkilling wonders of OxyContin, Vicodin or Percocet. While it is generally agreed upon that opioids are remarkably effective at suppressing pain, the question of their safety has yet to be resolved. There are still risks associated with these drugs, namely overdose and addiction.
An objective observer would conclude that requests for higher dosages of a potent narcotic are a clear sign of addiction, but physicians on the payroll of major pharmaceutical companies aren’t exactly objective observers. The fact that prescription drugs like OxyContin are recreationally abused in epidemic proportions across the United States is hard evidence that opioids carry a risk of addiction, but that’s just reality, not a pharmaceutical study. It’s downright impressive that pharmaceutical companies have managed to produce clinical studies that demonstrate the opposite. This goes to show there are indeed three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.
Pain medicine organizations and industry professionals have also maintained that there is no maximum dose of opioids, another claim that has yet to be verified by rigorous science. It is unreasonable to proceed with the mindset that there is no unsafe dose of a narcotic drug. I would like to talk to somebody from the opioid industry about the Zeno’s paradox they’ve fallen into: First, it is okay to take opioid pain medication. Also, for any given dose of opioid, it is always OK to take more.
In the past decade, pharmaceutical companies have been able to leverage the support of physicians and pain medication advocacy groups such as UW Pain, usually with large sums of money. Because of the pervasive influence of opioid manufacturers in the healthcare industry, these drugs have been overprescribed, and remaining concerns about their safety have remained unresolved. The fact that opioid manufacturers have been willfully ignoring or downplaying these concerns represents a serious conflict of interest.
Due to media scrutiny such as the Journal Sentinel’s, UW Pain has stopped accepting money from drug companies – money it never should have accepted in the first place – and yet the University of Wisconsin’s role in the arena of pain medication policy still shows considerable room for improvement. As a research institution, UW has a responsibility to investigate opioids from both the medical and healthcare policy perspective in a neutral, unbiased way.
I would hope to see the UW research community taking a leadership role in the transition to a new, more responsible strategy of pain medication. At the moment, it’s painful to know that UW-based research groups are acting as pawns in the healthcare industry and skewing research for the benefit of pharmaceutical companies, especially when these companies have an unfortunate tendency to value profit over their patients’ well-being.
Charles Godfrey ([email protected]) is a sophomore majoring in math and physics.
