Deal would also require multibillionaire family to give up ownership of the Connecticut-based firm

A federal bankruptcy court judge on Friday said he would approve OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma’s latest deal to settle thousands of lawsuits over the toll of opioids that includes some money for thousands of victims of the epidemic.

The deal overseen by US bankruptcy judge Sean Lane would require some of the multibillionaire members of the semi-reclusive Sackler family who own the company to contribute up to $7bn and give up ownership of the Connecticut-based firm.

The new agreement replaces one the US supreme court rejected last year, finding it would have improperly protected members of the family against future lawsuits. The judge said he would explain his decision in a hearing on Tuesday.

  • lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
    1·
    4 days ago

    On a good day they are at 3/10, bad day 8/10 on the 0 to 10 pain scale.

    Those pain scales are subjective junk that motivated the opioid epidemic from when special interests pushed that “5th vital sign” bullshit.

    This story covers how

    • Pain is not just a medical issue but a cultural and psychological phenomenon.
    • Attention amplifies pain; ignoring it can reduce its impact.
    • Effective treatment may require balancing resilience with emotional expression.

    Historically, physicians have regarded pain as “an inevitable part of life”, “not usually an emergency like low blood pressure or an erratic heartbeat”, and definitely not a vital sign.

    Then in 1995, the American Pain Society started a campaign referring to pain as the '5th vital sign', which caught on with medical bureaucracies and the pharmaceutical industry.

    CAMPBELL: Well, strictly speaking, pain wouldn’t be a vital sign because a vital sign would be a manifestation of the physiological functioning in the body that’s vital to life. So it’s vital in the sense of being associated with being alive.

    SPIEGEL: But Dr. Campbell still thought elevating the status of pain would do more good than harm. And since, in 1995, he was president of a medical organization called the American Pain Society, he used his presidential address to launch a campaign, and the idea caught fire. Over the next few years, lots of groups made pain a priority. The Veterans Health Administration put out a toolkit for doctors that emphasized pain as the fifth vital sign. The Federation of State Medical Boards encouraged doctors to systematically measure patient pain. And importantly, JCAHO, the main organization that offers accreditation to hospitals, published a document that emphasized the importance of assessing and treating patient pain. Dr. Campbell had helped to launch a revolution. It’s just like a genius marketing move.

    CAMPBELL: It was really amazing because it transformed medicine.

    SPIEGEL: But not in a purely positive way. Some people now argue that this small bureaucratic shift in medical practice and the way that it taught doctors and patients to see pain as a critical problem to be solved led ultimately to the opioid epidemic. After all, when doctors are expected to ask about pain, it’s hard not to give medications if a patient reports a high score. And several drug companies that made pain pills were quietly funding these initiatives. In fact, Dr. Campbell set up a pain awareness group that got a decade of financial backing from Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin. In congressional hearings on the opioid crisis, Dr. Campbell called the support, quote, “generous,” though the pain group’s chief executive later added that funders do not influence its work.

    What is beyond debate, however, is that conceiving of pain as the fifth vital sign and asking patients about their pain number meant that pain got a lot more attention than it ever had before. And here’s the thing about attention that most of us don’t fully appreciate. Attention is not a neutral force. It invariably changes the thing that it purports to observe. Often, it makes that thing bigger. Attention can change all kinds of things, even the physical response of the body - which brings us back to Devyn and her pain.

    Society is still paying the deleterious consequences.

    • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today
      1·
      3 days ago

      I don’t think I’ve ever read a more heartless and unempathetic reply in my whole life.

      Your post, and the linked article, boiled down, basically all say that doctors should ignore pain and patients who are in pain should just suck it up and not think about it.

      I’m very glad that medical science doesn’t treat patients in such a cold and uncaring manner. By this logic, there’s no reason to bother with anesthetic during or after surgery, because ‘pain is part of life’. There’s no reason to do joint replacements, because ‘pain is part of life’ and if the person can’t walk more than 10’ without pain too fucking bad for them.

      Perhaps someday there will be an objective way to measure pain- some scanner that can read the signals going up the spinal cord or can read activations of nerve endings. But until then, this is what we’ve got.

      I encourage you to take a serious look in the mirror and think about what kind of person you want to be. Because right now you’re someone that looks at a fellow human who is suffering and says ‘too bad, we shouldn’t lift a finger to help them’.

      • lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        Seems you want to repeat history.

        The fact is there is no objective measurement of pain & the dangerous addictiveness of those drugs has already caused an epidemic of deaths. Some doctors take their oath to first do no harm very seriously. As unpleasant as pain is, it doesn’t cause death.

        Modern society’s excessive preoccupation with pain relief has caused a crisis, and no lawsuit or monetary relief can undo all those needless deaths. Perhaps you should take a look in the mirror & learn some goddamn sense.

        ‘too bad, we shouldn’t lift a finger to help them’

        At least they’ll live.

        • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today
          1·
          2 days ago

          At least they’ll live.

          But what is the point of living if there’s no quality of life?

          This is the difference between treating a patient as a person and ignoring the person but treating the disease as a broken machine.

          Almost any medical treatment has potential or real side effects, possibly including death. Sometimes those side effects happen, and the risk is weighed against the benefit.
          Pain relief is no different. You’re acting like an opioid pill is a death sentence. The fact is under proper medical care and supervision they can be quite safe.

          The UNsafe things, the people who get addicted and die, are people who were NOT treated properly to begin with- given high dose extended release opioids (creating dependence), then cut off cold turkey. Proper protocol for that is a wean-off protocol where the dose is reduced slowly over time so the body adjusts without huge withdrawal. If the person turns to street drugs and ODs you’re right money can’t bring them back. But the problem is the prescriber that did an unsafe protocol, and the company that paid them to do it.

          Blaming the pill for effects caused by medical mistreatment is stupid.

          • lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
            1·
            58 minutes ago

            But what is the point of living if there’s no quality of life?

            What is the point if you don’t?

            The doctor has a valid moral claim not to promote deadly addictions.

            The fact is under proper medical care and supervision they can be quite safe.

            They can, and the doctor is the most qualified person to make that assessment.

            I’m criticizing your undervaluation of the dangers & poor acknowledgement of the cultural causes of the opioid epidemic such as misguided thinking about pain promoted by the pain scales, influence & regulatory capture by pain associations & pharmaceutical industries of medical policymakers to pressure physicians, campaigns popularizing myths. Competent doctors then & to this day found it all ridiculous & mostly disregard the pain scales: they rely on patient history & background, knowledge of their medical conditions, patient conversation.

            Some pain is untreatable, and there is something to the idea that focus amplifies pain, moderation & acceptance lessen it.

            But the problem is the prescriber that did an unsafe protocol, and the company that paid them to do it.

            That’s not how it works or the physician was incompetent.