Author: WorkCompAcademy

Patients who only briefly take opioid painkillers are still likely to face side effects, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine and reviewed by Reuters Health.

While side effects associated with long-term use of the drugs have been widely studied, this is not the case with patients who take opioids for less than two weeks, said study coauthor Dr. Raoul Daoust of Hopital du Sacre-Coeur de Montreal. To learn more, Daoust and colleagues studied 386 adults who had been discharged from an emergency department with an opioid prescription, 80% of whom took at least one pill.

More than half the patients who used opioids reported feeling drowsy. Patients also reported side effects like constipation, dizziness, weakness, nausea and vomiting. Overall, 79% of patients who used the painkillers said they experienced side effects that can be related to these drugs, compared to just 38% of patients who did not use opioids.

The type of opioid being used seemed to affect patients differently. Dizziness, nausea and vomiting were more often associated with oxycodone than morphine, for example.

The side effects of opioids can severely affect patients’ quality of life, sometimes prompting them to discontinue the drugs even though they remain in pain.

Opioid-induced constipation was a particularly persistent problem in the new study. The higher the dose of opioid, the more likely patients were to feel constipated.

“It was surprising to find that 38% of patients had constipation while consuming only a (relatively low dose of opioids) during the first two weeks,” Daoust told Reuters Health in an email. Older patients were more likely to experience constipation as a side effect.

Despite the risks and the side effects, Daoust believes that opioids should not be avoided entirely. Instead, he says, patients must be properly informed of the side effects they are likely to face and given advice on how to manage them, such as avoiding driving because of possible drowsiness, or taking laxatives to manage constipation.

Jaime Serna (DOB 1/29/1972), formerly of Fillmore, was placed on formal probation for a period of 36 months after pleading guilty to a felony violation of Insurance Code section 1871.4(a), making a fraudulent statement of a material fact for the purpose of obtaining workers’ compensation benefits.

Serna must make restitution to the victim, American Claims Management, in the amount of $27,955 and serve 180 days in the Ventura County jail as a condition of his probation.

Serna was employed by Agromin in Santa Paula as a truck driver and injured his right shoulder on May 12, 2010.

He was placed off work on temporary total disability and had shoulder surgery on September 10, 2010. He remained off work and continued to collect temporary total disability benefits of two-thirds of his salary, tax free.

On February 12, 2012, Agromin received a tip that Serna was working on cars and engaging in physical activities that contradicted his claimed physical limitations. Agromin notified its workers’ compensation insurance administrator, who retained private investigators to conduct surveillance of Serna.

Investigators obtained seven and a half hours of surveillance video of Serna working on cars at his residence. He was seen removing a radiator from the engine compartment, and removing and replacing batteries and the wheels and tires off the vehicle. He was also observed picking up a 36-lb. floor jack and carrying it into his garage. In July 2012, Serna gave a deposition and lied under oath about his injuries.

65 year old Tom Fallon was sentenced last week in the Long Beach Superior Court after being convicted in an open plea of 25 criminal counts of money laundering and grand theft. Fallon was sentenced to 10 years and four months in state prison. Restitution was ordered in the amount of $995,118.

A year-long investigation by the California Department of Insurance found that Fallon convinced his victims to deposit their workers’ compensation settlement checks into Workers’ Compensation Medicare Set Aside Accounts (WCMSA), as required by law. However, Fallon convinced his victims to deposit their settlement funds with companies he owns in order to embezzle $995,118 for his personal gain and to fund various other businesses.

“Fallon abused his clients’ trust in order to access their money and then stole it to stuff his own pockets,” said Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara. “Fallon’s callous actions ruined lives. Thanks to the hard work of investigators at the Department of Insurance and the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office, his victims have justice.”

Fallon worked in the same office as the victims’ attorney and urged victims to deposit their funds in a WCMSA with his companies, Fortis Financial Insurance Services, Inc., and Legacy Group Financial. Evidence obtained by investigators revealed that victims’ funds were deposited into Fortis companies and no WCMSA accounts were ever established.

During the victim impact statements that were held on June 4, 2019, most of the victims had the opportunity to address Judge Daniel Lowenthal in an open court hearing. Victim after victim appealed for justice to be carried out. Many of the victims took the court through each detail of their excruciating journeys such as losing their homes, their way of lives, their retirement nest eggs, and in one case a victim took her own life because she was unable to cope with the impact of her loss.

Judge Lowenthal stated in open court that in all his years on the bench, he had never been so moved by the victim impact statements presented before him that day.

A WCMSA is a financial agreement that allocates a portion of workers’ compensation settlements to pay for future medical services related to the worker’ compensation injury, illness, or disease. These funds must be depleted before Medicare will pay for treatment related to the workers’ compensation injury, illness, or disease.

An Ohio drug wholesale distributor and two former executives were charged with profiting from the U.S. opioid epidemic by selling millions of pills despite signs the addictive drugs were being misused.

Federal prosecutors in Cincinnati charged Miami-Luken Inc and four people with conspiring to distribute controlled substances in the second U.S. criminal case against a drug distributor over its role in a crisis that has killed hundreds of thousands of people.

The indictment charged the Springboro, Ohio-based company; Anthony Rattini, its former president; James Barlay, Miami-Luken’s former compliance officer, and two pharmacists with conspiring to distribute controlled substances.

Prosecutors said Miami-Luken and the executives failed to guard against the dangerous drugs it shipped to pharmacies in five states from being diverted for illegal uses or to report suspicious orders to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

It shipped millions of pills to rural Appalachia, where the opioid epidemic was at its peak, including 3.7 million hydrocodone pills from 2008 to 2011 to a pharmacy in Kermit, West Virginia, a town of just 400 people, prosecutors said.

Two pharmacists who ordered drugs from Miami-Luken were also charged: Devonna Miller-West, the owner of Oceana, West Virginia-based Westside Pharmacy, and Samuel Ballengee, who ran Williamson, West Virginia’s Tug Valley Pharmacy.

Defense lawyers could not be immediately identified. Miami-Luken last year said it would close its operations.

The case is the latest to result from investigations into the extent drug manufacturers and distributors helping fuel the deadly opioid abuse epidemic.

Top executives from distributors as well as Miami-Luken were called to testify before a Congressional committee in May 2018 regarding the opioid epidemic. Asked if they contributed to it, only Miami-Luken’s then-chairman, Joseph Mastandrea, said yes.

Prosecutors said Miami-Luken, which closed in October, made more than $173 million in consolidated sales from 2008 to 2015 supplying drugs to 200 pharmacies in Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana and Tennessee.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan in April brought the first opioid-related criminal case against a distributor, upstate New York’s Rochester Drug Co-operative Inc. The company paid $20 million to resolve the charges.

The data, released this week by a federal court in Ohio as part of a far-reaching opioids case, shows that companies distributed 8.4 billion hydrocodone and oxycodone pills to commercial pharmacies in 2006 and 12.6 billion in 2012. That’s an increase of over 50%.

Over that seven-year period, 76 billion pills were distributed in all, according to an analysis by The Washington Post, which had sued along with another outlet, HD Media, to obtain the data.The shipments increased even after one of the companies, Purdue Pharma, was leveled with a $635 million federal fine in 2007 for falsely claiming its drug, OxyContin, was not as addictive as earlier opioids.

While OxyContin is the best-known prescription opioid, the Post analysis shows that Purdue accounted for just 3% of pills sold during that time. Three makers of generic drugs accounted for nearly 90% of the sales.

The data tracks a dozen different opioids, including oxycodone and hydrocodone, according to the Post. They account for most of the pill shipments to pharmacies.

The distribution data, maintained by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, is a key element of lawsuits filed by more than 2,000 state, local and tribal governments seeking to hold drug companies accountable for the crisis.

Drug distribution companies told The Post that the federal data would not exist without their providing accurate reports to the DEA.

One company, AmerisourceBergen, said the data “offers a very misleading picture.”

Cleveland-based U.S. District Judge Dan Polster, who is overseeing most of the cases, ruled Monday that the information covering shipments from 2006 to 2012 could be made public. He said in a ruling that there is “clearly no basis” for shielding older data.

His order came a month after a federal appeals court in Cincinnati vacated Polster’s July 2018 decision that local and state governments, which had been granted access to the data, should not make it public.

A three-judge panel for the 6th U.S. Court of Appeals said Polster went too far in blocking the release of data that government attorneys argued could compromise DEA investigations. Polster asked attorneys from all sides Monday to suggest how DEA data collected for 2013 and 2014 should be protected.

The Washington Post and HD Media, which owns newspapers in West Virginia, went to court for access and were the first media outlets to receive the data. By Tuesday, it had not been made available to the public or other news organizations that had requested it, including The Associated Press.

In a statement, a group of plaintiff attorneys applauded Polster’s decision.

The first scheduled trial before Polster is set for October in lawsuits filed by Ohio’s Summit and Cuyahoga counties, areas that have been hit particularly hard by the ongoing opioid crisis. It is considered a bellwether trial that could force the defendants to reach a global settlement for all of the lawsuits.

A trial in an opioid suit brought by Johnson & Johnson by Oklahoma in state court there wrapped up this week. A judge will rule on that case. Purdue and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. were named in that suit but settled before the trial.