American Pain

American Pain PDF Author: John Temple
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1493019597
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
* Finalist for the Edgar® Award in Best Fact Crime * New York Post, “The Post’s Favorite Books of 2015” * Suspense Magazine’s “Best True Crime Books of 2015” * Foreword Reviews’ INDIEFAB Book of the Year in True Crime * Publishers Weekly, Big Indie Book of Fall 2015 The king of the Florida pill mills was American Pain, a mega-clinic expressly created to serve addicts posing as patients. From a fortress-like former bank building, American Pain’s doctors distributed massive quantities of oxycodone to hundreds of customers a day, mostly traffickers and addicts who came by the vanload. Inked muscle-heads ran the clinic’s security. Former strippers operated the pharmacy, counting out pills and stashing cash in garbage bags. Under their lab coats, the doctors carried guns—and it was all legal… sort of. American Pain was the brainchild of Chris George, a 27-year-old convicted drug felon. The son of a South Florida home builder, Chris George grew up in ultra-rich Wellington, where Bill Gates, Springsteen, and Madonna kept houses. Thick-necked from weightlifting, he and his twin brother hung out with mobsters, invested in strip clubs, brawled with cops, and grinned for their mug shots. After the housing market stalled, a local doctor clued in the brothers to the burgeoning underground market for lightly regulated prescription painkillers. In Florida, pain clinics could dispense the meds, and no one tracked the patients. Seizing the opportunity, Chris George teamed up with the doctor, and word got out. Just two years later Chris had raked in $40 million, and 90 percent of the pills his doctors prescribed flowed north to feed the rest of the country’s insatiable narcotics addiction. Meanwhile, hundreds more pain clinics in the mold of American Pain had popped up in the Sunshine State, creating a gigantic new drug industry. American Pain chronicles the rise and fall of this game-changing pill mill, and how it helped tip the nation into its current opioid crisis, the deadliest drug epidemic in American history. The narrative swings back and forth between Florida and Kentucky, and is populated by a gaudy and diverse cast of characters. This includes the incongruous band of wealthy bad boys, thugs and esteemed physicians who built American Pain, as well as penniless Kentucky clans who transformed themselves into painkiller trafficking rings. It includes addicts whose lives were devastated by American Pain’s drugs, and the federal agents and grieving mothers who labored for years to bring the clinic’s crew to justice.

American Pain

American Pain PDF Author: John Temple
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1493019597
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
* Finalist for the Edgar® Award in Best Fact Crime * New York Post, “The Post’s Favorite Books of 2015” * Suspense Magazine’s “Best True Crime Books of 2015” * Foreword Reviews’ INDIEFAB Book of the Year in True Crime * Publishers Weekly, Big Indie Book of Fall 2015 The king of the Florida pill mills was American Pain, a mega-clinic expressly created to serve addicts posing as patients. From a fortress-like former bank building, American Pain’s doctors distributed massive quantities of oxycodone to hundreds of customers a day, mostly traffickers and addicts who came by the vanload. Inked muscle-heads ran the clinic’s security. Former strippers operated the pharmacy, counting out pills and stashing cash in garbage bags. Under their lab coats, the doctors carried guns—and it was all legal… sort of. American Pain was the brainchild of Chris George, a 27-year-old convicted drug felon. The son of a South Florida home builder, Chris George grew up in ultra-rich Wellington, where Bill Gates, Springsteen, and Madonna kept houses. Thick-necked from weightlifting, he and his twin brother hung out with mobsters, invested in strip clubs, brawled with cops, and grinned for their mug shots. After the housing market stalled, a local doctor clued in the brothers to the burgeoning underground market for lightly regulated prescription painkillers. In Florida, pain clinics could dispense the meds, and no one tracked the patients. Seizing the opportunity, Chris George teamed up with the doctor, and word got out. Just two years later Chris had raked in $40 million, and 90 percent of the pills his doctors prescribed flowed north to feed the rest of the country’s insatiable narcotics addiction. Meanwhile, hundreds more pain clinics in the mold of American Pain had popped up in the Sunshine State, creating a gigantic new drug industry. American Pain chronicles the rise and fall of this game-changing pill mill, and how it helped tip the nation into its current opioid crisis, the deadliest drug epidemic in American history. The narrative swings back and forth between Florida and Kentucky, and is populated by a gaudy and diverse cast of characters. This includes the incongruous band of wealthy bad boys, thugs and esteemed physicians who built American Pain, as well as penniless Kentucky clans who transformed themselves into painkiller trafficking rings. It includes addicts whose lives were devastated by American Pain’s drugs, and the federal agents and grieving mothers who labored for years to bring the clinic’s crew to justice.

Empire of Pain

Empire of Pain PDF Author: Patrick Radden Keefe
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 038554569X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 574

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. From the prize-winning and bestselling author of Say Nothing. "A real-life version of the HBO series Succession with a lethal sting in its tail…a masterful work of narrative reportage.” – Laura Miller, Slate The history of the Sackler dynasty is rife with drama—baroque personal lives; bitter disputes over estates; fistfights in boardrooms; glittering art collections; Machiavellian courtroom maneuvers; and the calculated use of money to burnish reputations and crush the less powerful. The Sackler name has adorned the walls of many storied institutions—Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, but the source of the family fortune was vague—until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for the opioid crisis. Empire of Pain is the saga of three generations of a single family and the mark they would leave on the world, a tale that moves from the bustling streets of early twentieth-century Brooklyn to the seaside palaces of Greenwich, Connecticut, and Cap d’Antibes to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. It follows the family’s early success with Valium to the much more potent OxyContin, marketed with a ruthless technique of co-opting doctors, influencing the FDA, downplaying the drug’s addictiveness. Empire of Pain chronicles the multiple investigations of the Sacklers and their company, and the scorched-earth legal tactics that the family has used to evade accountability. A masterpiece of narrative reporting, Empire of Pain is a ferociously compelling portrait of America’s second Gilded Age, a study of impunity among the super-elite and a relentless investigation of the naked greed that built one of the world’s great fortunes.

Pain Management and the Opioid Epidemic

Pain Management and the Opioid Epidemic PDF Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309459575
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 483

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Book Description
Drug overdose, driven largely by overdose related to the use of opioids, is now the leading cause of unintentional injury death in the United States. The ongoing opioid crisis lies at the intersection of two public health challenges: reducing the burden of suffering from pain and containing the rising toll of the harms that can arise from the use of opioid medications. Chronic pain and opioid use disorder both represent complex human conditions affecting millions of Americans and causing untold disability and loss of function. In the context of the growing opioid problem, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched an Opioids Action Plan in early 2016. As part of this plan, the FDA asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to convene a committee to update the state of the science on pain research, care, and education and to identify actions the FDA and others can take to respond to the opioid epidemic, with a particular focus on informing FDA's development of a formal method for incorporating individual and societal considerations into its risk-benefit framework for opioid approval and monitoring.

Relieving Pain in America

Relieving Pain in America PDF Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 030921484X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
Chronic pain costs the nation up to $635 billion each year in medical treatment and lost productivity. The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act required the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to enlist the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in examining pain as a public health problem. In this report, the IOM offers a blueprint for action in transforming prevention, care, education, and research, with the goal of providing relief for people with pain in America. To reach the vast multitude of people with various types of pain, the nation must adopt a population-level prevention and management strategy. The IOM recommends that HHS develop a comprehensive plan with specific goals, actions, and timeframes. Better data are needed to help shape efforts, especially on the groups of people currently underdiagnosed and undertreated, and the IOM encourages federal and state agencies and private organizations to accelerate the collection of data on pain incidence, prevalence, and treatments. Because pain varies from patient to patient, healthcare providers should increasingly aim at tailoring pain care to each person's experience, and self-management of pain should be promoted. In addition, because there are major gaps in knowledge about pain across health care and society alike, the IOM recommends that federal agencies and other stakeholders redesign education programs to bridge these gaps. Pain is a major driver for visits to physicians, a major reason for taking medications, a major cause of disability, and a key factor in quality of life and productivity. Given the burden of pain in human lives, dollars, and social consequences, relieving pain should be a national priority.

Cancer Pain Management

Cancer Pain Management PDF Author: Deborah B. McGuire
Publisher: Jones & Bartlett Learning
ISBN: 9780867207255
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
Cancer Pain Management, Second Edition will substantially advance pain education. The unique combination of authors -- an educator, a leading practitioner and administrator, and a research scientist -- provides comprehensive, authoritative coverage in addressing this important aspect of cancer care. The contributors, acknowledged experts in their areas, address a wide scope of issues. Educating health care providers to better assess and manage pain and improve patientsrsquo; and familiesrsquo; coping strategies are primary goals of this book. Developing research-based clinical guidelines and increasing funding for research is also covered. Ethical issues surrounding pain management and health policy implications are also explored.

In Pain

In Pain PDF Author: Travis Rieder
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062854666
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
NPR Best Book of 2019 A bioethicist’s eloquent and riveting memoir of opioid dependence and withdrawal—a harrowing personal reckoning and clarion call for change not only for government but medicine itself, revealing the lack of crucial resources and structures to handle this insidious nationwide epidemic. Travis Rieder’s terrifying journey down the rabbit hole of opioid dependence began with a motorcycle accident in 2015. Enduring half a dozen surgeries, the drugs he received were both miraculous and essential to his recovery. But his most profound suffering came several months later when he went into acute opioid withdrawal while following his physician’s orders. Over the course of four excruciating weeks, Rieder learned what it means to be “dope sick”—the physical and mental agony caused by opioid dependence. Clueless how to manage his opioid taper, Travis’s doctors suggested he go back on the drugs and try again later. Yet returning to pills out of fear of withdrawal is one route to full-blown addiction. Instead, Rieder continued the painful process of weaning himself. Rieder’s experience exposes a dark secret of American pain management: a healthcare system so conflicted about opioids, and so inept at managing them, that the crisis currently facing us is both unsurprising and inevitable. As he recounts his story, Rieder provides a fascinating look at the history of these drugs first invented in the 1800s, changing attitudes about pain management over the following decades, and the implementation of the pain scale at the beginning of the twenty-first century. He explores both the science of addiction and the systemic and cultural barriers we must overcome if we are to address the problem effectively in the contemporary American healthcare system. In Pain is not only a gripping personal account of dependence, but a groundbreaking exploration of the intractable causes of America’s opioid problem and their implications for resolving the crisis. Rieder makes clear that the opioid crisis exists against a backdrop of real, debilitating pain—and that anyone can fall victim to this epidemic.

American AGONY

American AGONY PDF Author: Helen Borel
Publisher: Fresh Ink Group
ISBN: 1947867709
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Managing pain with opioids is a science—except politics, money, and overzealous law enforcement are denying American patients the relief they so desperately need. Demonizing the best pain reliever we have leads to needless suffering, even suicides, and it drives the rise in deadly street drugs. Helen Borel gathers and presents the evidence, the intimidation, the raids of clinics, the chilling effect on those very professionals we trust to care for our loved ones and ourselves. She looks hard at the Veterans Administration, Drug Enforcement Agency, Department of Justice, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Chapters include “The Suboxone Hoax,” “The Wrong Arms of the Law,” and “The Epidemic of Death,” plus an entire section on solutions for this widespread crisis. Read American AGONY now—or youmight be the next one hurt.

Pain Killer

Pain Killer PDF Author: Barry Meier
Publisher: Rodale
ISBN: 9781579546380
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Examines OxyContin, the so-called miracle prescription drug that swept the nation but led to overdoes and addiction, providing a look at the multi-billion-dollar pain managment business, its excesses and its abuses.

The Pain Survival Guide

The Pain Survival Guide PDF Author: Dennis C. Turk
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
ISBN: 9781433831829
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"10 clinically proven strategies from the leading experts on pain management--Cover"

Pain and the Aesthetics of US Literary Realism

Pain and the Aesthetics of US Literary Realism PDF Author: Cynthia J. Davis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198858736
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
The postbellum period saw many privileged Americans pursuing a civilized ideal premised on insulation from pain. Medico-scientific advances in anesthetics and analgesics and emergent religious sects like Christian Science made pain avoidance seem newly possible. The upper classes could increasingly afford to distance themselves from the suffering they claimed to feel more exquisitely than did their supposedly less refined contemporaries and antecedents. The five US literary realists examined in this study resisted this contemporary revulsion from pain without going so far as to join those who celebrated suffering for its invigorating effects. William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, and Charles Chesnutt embraced the concept of a heightened sensitivity to pain as a consequence of the civilizing process but departed from their peers by delineating alternative definitions of a superior sensibility indebted to suffering. Although the treatment of pain in other influential nineteenth century literary modes including sentimentalism and naturalism has attracted ample scholarly attention, this book offers the first sustained analysis of pain's importance to US literary realism as practiced by five of its most influential proponents.