DECONSTRUCTED 2: HOW AMERICA’S MEDICAL/RESEARCH COLLUSION LIES TO YOU ABOUT THE OPIOID CRISIS
Ignoring confounding factor of increasing availability and use of naloxone to slow opioid death rates, results are spun as disinformation to support relaxed safety standards for prescribed MAT opioid Suboxone
by Clark Miller
Published February 5, 2023
In a recent post we saw how the medical/research collusion fabricating constructed, desired outcomes of studies – thereby health policy and outcomes for public health services – shaped research outcomes to disinformation by ignoring the obvious, uncontrolled confounding factor in the study of opioid overdose mortality for incarcerated individuals receiving medication for opioid use disorder, or MOUD.
On examination and consideration of that confounding factor – increasing use and overdose death prevention with naloxone tied to concerted, multi-faceted campaigns for increased saves including efforts to target the study’s high-risk cohort – it became clear that no conclusions attributing benefit from MOUD were possible and that additional features reported (no difference in re-incarceration rates) also weighed against benefit in psychosocial functioning due to MOUD.
Now another study engages in the same obvious form of unsupportable conclusions spun by deception and posing dangerous public health disinformation.
Here’s the original research article in JAMA –
The relevant research question here is whether the relaxed prescribing and distribution standards for buprenorphine over the pandemic – buprenorphine established (see also here, under “the hupe ecoonmy”) as widely diverted, abused, and serving as currency in street economies of illicit high-risk opioid use – would have resulted in increased high-risk use of opioids and associated health risks including potential for lethal overdose.
That is, have the outcomes predicted based on surveys of the concerns of medical prescribers themselves – who continued to dispense opioids despite those concerns – been detected by relevant evidence and objective interpretation?
There are signs that harmful outcomes did in fact increase over the pandemic period, including these –
XChange Recovery is a treatment program in Vancouver, Washington. Smith was referring to Suboxone (buprenorphine) in an article published this year, January 2023.
Back to the research,
relaxed safety standards for prescribing buprenorphine, and public health outcomes.
Concluding that those relaxed standards over pandemic periods did not and have not resulted in negative outcomes including higher incidence of high-risk opioid use and lethal overdose is completely unwarranted unless evidence can be provided establishing no explanatory effect from the potentially confounding factor of increased frequency of naloxone reversals preventing deaths in what would otherwise have been an increase in OD deaths tied to increased high-risk use including overdose.
No such evidence was offered in the study.
That evidence in fact does not exist,
because use of naloxone to reverse potential overdose deaths was increasing over the pandemic, significantly and including by emergency response being called for, exposing the lie of “social isolation” accounting for surging opioid overdose deaths through (now after) pandemic period.
It’s established that naloxone campaigns over past years have contributed to steadily increasing availability, training, public awareness, acceptance, and distribution and use of the OD-reversing drug.
That would have been enhanced and focused on the population for this study due to status as high-risk for adverse outcome and by necessary regular interactions with healthcare services increasingly providing naloxone including pharmacies (where buprenorphine prescriptions would be provided regardless of modality of contact with the prescriber), a locus of these efforts.
Beginning in pre-pandemic years and continuing, a variety of laws, coordinated agreements, and shifts in public health awareness and policy contributed to enhanced likelihood of members of this study population’s increased provision of naloxone, particularly in their use of pharmacies. Some changes include mandatory co-prescribing, standing orders, and others.
At least some of the laws seem to be resulting in statistically significant reductions in opioid overdose deaths. That makes sense.
But that clearly confounding and invalidating factor of differentially increased naloxone saves is not taken into account in studies and results of this type that are instead blindly and predictably spun to fabricate protection against exposure of increasing lethality tied to MAT opioids.
That lethality may likely become increasingly difficult to hide, even with masking by steadily increasing use of naloxone to manage and moderate it, even with the persistent use of disinformation and threat to public health from America’s research/medical collusion.
