The older I get, the more I have a growing annoyance with experts. I have patients to see in a few minutes so this will be brief – and followed by a longer discussion at some point. Besides, my hosting service is down this morning so who knows when I’ll get this up.
For a broad example, every climate writer includes a line in almost every article stating that hurricanes have increased in number and strength over the years because of ‘climate change’. They write that even as the most advanced and courageous members of their field say ‘WRONG” – we can’t attribute almost anything to ‘climate change’. It wouldn’t be hard for those writers to look at the official data provided by government agencies, such as the graph on the right of this page. Does that look like a growing hurricane problem?
I am annoyed that our youth are taught, from day one, that the Earth is burning. They hear it in elementary school, high school, and colleges, as almost all educators have the same politics. Politicians on both sides spew ‘information’ for one reason – to get their side to vote for them. The result is zealotry from whoever follows politics the most – which happens to be the people who write our laws.
Many young people actually believe that a ‘generational’ storm is caused by climate change – that apparently the entire US once felt like San Diego, but now has occasional heat waves, snowstorms, and tornadoes.
To focus on buprenorphine or Suboxone, there has been a nonsensical avoidance of the plain buprenorphine product going on literally 20 years now. I always assumed that docs and pharmacists would eventually figure things out, but I was wrong. Apparently, few people actually read the literature and hold a curiosity about the science.
Adding naloxone to buprenorphine does NOTHING. When Suboxone was approved in 2000 and eventually released in 2003, naloxone was added to supposedly reduce intravenous use of the drug. It was clear back then that naloxone did nothing else; after all, only 3%, at most, is absorbed sublingually, and the half-life of naloxone is very short. Any naloxone that happens to be absorbed is completely blocked by the overwhelming amount of buprenorphine at the receptor, and that naloxone is metabolized easily within an hour, if not 20 minutes. Naloxone is irrelevant.
Missed by regulators, apparently, is that naloxone doesn’t even do anything significant when Suboxone is dissolved and injected. Yes, it slightly reduces ‘liking scores’. But anyone who spends a moment on Quora, or on my forum, will read comments by people who have injected dissolved Suboxone film and found little or no difference from injecting plain buprenorphine. A month of buprenorphine, a very effective treatment for opioid use disorder, costs $20 at Walgreens in my area. But Tennessee banned the drug, and pharmacists in the northern half of my state allow the solo product only during pregnancy.
When I have asked pharmacists and even physicians why they avoid the plain product, the comment I usually hear is ‘it doesn’t have naloxone so people can get high from it.’ Ugh. It would take those people three minutes to read an abstract from 20 years ago. It would take even less time to look up the half-life of naloxone.
Enough venting for one morning – time for work!
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