The War On Doctors And Science
On November 4, 2015 the DEA acting administrator
Chuck Rosenberg warned doctors and the public: guns safer than prescription drugs. He declared that in 2013 more than
46,000 people in the United States died from a drug overdose and more than half
of those were caused by prescription painkillers and heroin.
Those words echoed around the world broadcasting our
collective ignorance of modern science and complex problems such as addiction,
mental illness, pain and their treatment.
Is a
police chief qualified to offer medical opinions? Does
a police chief have enough familiarity with
statistical sciences? It is possible Mr. Rosenberg was just repeating what CDC’
vital signs have been declaring for a good while: prescription pain medications
have caused twin epidemics of heroin
addiction and drug overdose deaths.
Conceptually
there is something logically very wrong in declaring prescription pain
medications as the chief culprit based upon statistics without context.
Superficial
statistics may dissect a highly complex dynamic problem to several concrete blocks for wrong answers.
CDC reaches
erroneous conclusions by treating association as causation. And then using
false advertising to bombard the press, doctors and the public with
falsehoods.
How CDC – blames prescription pain medications for causing twin epidemics is
not a credit for science. Using misleading statistics to persecute doctors at
the expense of millions of victims of chronic pain is a low point for medicine.
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