Healthy Skepticism Library item: 19441

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Electronic Source

Silverman E
OxyContin, Prescribing Habits & Pharma Influence
Pharmalot 2011 Mar 17
http://www.pharmalot.com/2011/03/oxycontin-presribing-habits-pharma-influence/

Full text:

Some doctors are writing significantly more prescriptions for powerful painkillers such as OxyContin than others and the trend is blamed by some on undue influence from drugmakers. The issue was raised thanks to a study analyzing prescription trends among physicians in Ontario, where doctors who wrote the largest number of scrips also had the highest numbers of patient deaths linked to the drugs.
The study examined prescription records from 2006 for people ages 15 to 64 who qualified for drug coverage. Of 408 people whose deaths were linked to opioid painkillers, 166 – or 40 percent – were given at least one scrip in the preceding 12 months. And of these, 102 received a final script before death from a family physician. And 62 percent of those who died while in the care of a family physician shared an interesting statistic – their docs were among the most frequent prescribers.
“The drugs need to be used and prescribed with great care,” lead author Irfan Dhalla, a staff physician and scientist at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto and lecturer in the Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto, tells The Montreal Gazette. “I think education needs to occur at all levels. Medical students don’t receive enough education about these issues, and until recently at many universities, the education was being delivered – at least in part – by people who have ties to the pharmaceutical industry and were presenting information that was potentially biased.”
The study was published in the latest issue of Canadian Family Physician. And it appears not long after the University of Toronto revised its 2010 curriculum for a pain-management course because a 371-page pain-management book was funded and copyrighted by Purdue Pharma, which makes OxyContin, and distributed to students, the paper notes. In fact, the course was funded, in part, by drugmakers from 2002 to 2006, although the practice ended four years ago.
The backdrop to this concern has a surge in opioid-related deaths. A 2009 report by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario found deaths in Ontario rose 49 per cent between 2002 and 2006. And deaths linked to oxycodone, which is the active ingredient in OxyContin, jumped 240 percent during the same period, the Gazette writes. Last November, the Ontario government passed the Narcotics Safety and Awareness Act, which will allow the Ministry of Health to monitor opioid scrips and stop addicts from obtaining drugs from multiple doctors simultaneously.