Tag: prescription drugs
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Attorney General Coleman sues Express Scripts for role in opioid crisis
By Melissa Patrick Kentucky Health News Attorney General Russell Coleman has sued Express Scripts, one of the largest pharmacy benefit managers in the nation, for what he called the company’s...
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Drug makers’ payments to doctors may influence their choice of what drugs to prescribe, and that can cost patients real money
By Trudy LiebermanRural Health News Service Peggy, an Indiana woman and reader of this column, recently sent me a lengthy email about her 94-year-old mother who is rapidly...
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Big drug bill heads to governor’s desk; has harsher penalties and limits most prescriptions for acute pain to 3 days
By Melissa Patrick Kentucky Health News A bill that would limit most painkiller prescriptions to a three-day supply for acute pain, and change how synthetic-opioid traffickers are prosecuted, flew through...
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Nurse practitioners ease doctor shortage, but will have to wait to get more authority to prescribe narcotics; opioid epidemic cited
Nurse practitioner Robin Szczapinski talks with her patient, Harold Brashear Sr., at the Louisville Veterans Affairs Medical Center. (Courier-Journal photo by Maggie Huber) They’re not doctors, but they do a lot...
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House sends Senate bill to limit most potent painkiller prescriptions to three days, target traffickers of fentanyl
The state House has sent to the Senate a bill to put a three-day limit on prescriptions of high-potency painkillers, and increase penalties for the sale of fentanyl, in an...
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Legislature moving bills targeting fentanyl sales, shortening length of most opioid prescriptions to three days
The General Assembly is moving bills to increase penalties for the sale of fentanyl and put a three-day limit on prescriptions of other high-potency painkillers, in an effort to stem...
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Pharmacies dispensing opioids thrive in Clay County, which leads Kentucky in doses of hydrocodone per person: 150 a year
Pharmacies dispensing opioids are thriving in an impoverished, coal-depressed county in Eastern Kentucky, Phil Galewitz reports for Kaiser Health News. In Clay County (Wikipedia map) the unemployment rate is 8.4 percent,...
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UK’s chief medical officer says doctors should follow university trauma team’s example and not prescribe an opioid first
By Melissa Patrick Kentucky Health News The University of Kentucky hospital trauma team has adopted a protocol to treat acute pain that they hope will be adopted by the entire...
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Substance-use treatment under Medicaid jumps, following expansion of program and increase in abuse of painkillers
Kentucky’s expanded Medicaid program covered approximately 11,000 substance-use treatment services in the second quarter of 2016, a huge increase from the 1,500 services from January through March 2014, the first...
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1/3 of long-term prescription opioid users say they’re addicted
One-third of long-term opioid users in the U.S. report being addicted or dependent on the painkillers, and nearly all of the long-term users in the survey said they got their...