Author: Suzanne B. Robotti

Suzanne B. Robotti

Suzanne is the President and Founder of MedShadow, and the Executive Director of DES Action USA.  MedShadow’s mission is to preserve quality of life by ensuring everyone has access to the risks, benefits and alternates to using drugs to manage healthcare. Read More

Most infants born with Prenatal Opioid Exposure (POE) look and seem completely unaffected – even those that go through withdrawal. A new meta-analysis shows that brain development and motor skills in children exposed to opioids in pregnancy lag behind other children significantly.

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Study Shows a Combination of Ibuprofen and Acetaminophen are Better Than Opioids For Pain If you have a lot of pain in your leg or arm, you might be expecting (and hoping!) that your doctor will give you a powerful pain reliever like codeine or oxycodone. That would likely be a mistake. A new study published today in JAMA (Journal of American Medical Association) shows that opioids don’t work any better than a combination of ibuprofen and acetaminophen, and opioids create significantly higher concern in the medical community. Just over 400 patients who arrived in the ER complaining of bad…

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FDA

opiA proposed opioid will stain the mouths of addicts who try to abuse it. But will — or should — the FDA OK it? An inside look. I just came back from Washington, having sat on the FDA advisory panel to review the research on IPC Oxy, a new  opioid drug application from Intellipharmaceutics. The Chair of the panel will send a report of the questions raised and comments of the Advisory Committee to the FDA. Ultimately the decision on whether IPC Oxy should be approved will be made by the FDA and announced. The panel consisted of the combination…

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FDA Advisory Committee Hearing for Opana ER More than 400 pages of medical research, 11 hours of testimony and a blizzard in March. Welcome to my first FDA Advisory hearing! I am the newly appointed consumer representative on the Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee for the FDA. On March 13 and 14, our committee was joined with a sister committee. Anesthetic and Analgesic Drug Products, to determine if, based on new postmarketing research, the benefits of Opana ER, an opioid pain med, still outweigh its risks. About a week before the meeting, 4 CDs arrived at my house…

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Is your cholesterol high? Has your doctor suggested you might be at risk for heart disease? If so, you have some decisions to make. You need to know that you can likely improve your health and lower your cholesterol by simple lifestyle changes like exercise and changing your diet. You also will likely have the option of taking a statin. The fact that people have choices in their health care is very important and something we explore at MedShadow, an online nonprofit I founded to inform the public about the side effects, risks and benefits of medicine, both prescription and…

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One of the most fascinating aspects of learning about side effects of drugs has been to discover that many side effects are predictable based on how the a drug works in the body — what is called “method of action.” Opioids, for example, work by slowing pain receptors and increasing dopamine, a chemical that controls the brain’s reward and pleasure center, which is an effective way of inhibiting the body’s ability to feel pain and makes you feel great. Erin Attermeier This colorful and informative video explains how opioids work (there’s no sound). However, opioids not only go to the brain but also move throughout…

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Does it really make sense to put a large group of people on a drug whose effectiveness hasn’t been proven for that group? What at first looked like a creeping increase in statin prescriptions is turning into a gallop. Despite the significant and life-altering side effects that this class of cholesterol-lowering drugs can cause, the USPSTF (US Preventative Services Task Force) is likely to approve a broadening of the group of adults for whom statins are recommended — without including a recommendation to try lifestyle changes to lower cholesterol first. The USPSTF is proposing that any healthy adult between the ages…

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It’s Discouraging to See that Doctors Continue to Prescribe Opioids in the Face of Rising Addiction, Overdoses and Valid Alternatives Shockingly, the CDC has proposed guidelines for PCPs (primary care providers) on prescribing opioids — OxyContin, Percocet, Vicodin and the like — for chronic pain. What’s the problem with that? Everything. Why are PCPs — family physicians or internists — not referring patients with chronic pain to a specialist who is trained in pain management including the use of NSAIDS, opioids and alternatives to drugs? Why are opioids being prescribed for chronic pain when there is very little evidence that…

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On Tuesday during the great snowstorm that wasn’t (for NYC at least), I spent the late afternoon with a small popcorn and Jennifer Aniston. I’d heard the new movie, “Cake,” portrayed how easy it was to become addiction to pain meds even when used as prescribed. That was not the movie I saw. (Spoiler alert: I freely talk about plot points in the movie.) What I saw was a movie about how badly chronic pain and depression are managed in our country. The Aniston character had been in severe pain for more than a year after a terrible accident. She…

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When the doctors who are charged with managing pain come out with a public policy position against use of opioids (like oxycodone, methodone and hydrocodine) for chronic pain, we should pay attention. The American Academy of Neurology (AAN) released a position statement in December 2014 to tell the world that chronic use of opioids provides “no substantial evidence for maintenance of pain relief or improved function over long periods of time (over 3 months) without incurring serious risk of overdose, dependence, or addiction.” In this policy statement, the Academy finds that the effectiveness of opioids for chronic non-cancer pain is…

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