Nonfatal and fatal drug overdoses increased overall from 2019 to 2020 (1).* Illicit benzodiazepines (e.g., etizolam, flualprazolam, and flubromazolam)† were increasingly detected among postmortem and clinical samples in 2020, often with opioids,§ and might have contributed to overall increases in drug overdoses. Availability of recent multistate trend data on nonfatal benzodiazepine-involved overdoses and involvement of illicit benzodiazepines in overdoses is limited.
This data gap was addressed by analyzing annual and quarterly trends in suspected benzodiazepine-involved nonfatal overdoses treated in emergency departments (EDs) (benzodiazepine overdose ED visits) during January 2019–December 2020 (32 states and the District of Columbia [DC]) and benzodiazepine-involved overdose deaths (benzodiazepine deaths), which include both illicit and prescription benzodiazepines, during January 2019–June 2020 (23 states) from CDC’s Overdose Data to Action (OD2A) program.
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Israeli study found enhanced protocol helped treat any reactions quickly
Most highly allergic adults were able to safely receive the two-dose series of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine (BNT162b2; Comirnaty), a prospective single-center study found.
Of 429 highly allergic patients who received the first dose of the mRNA vaccine, mild allergic reactions occurred in 1.4% and 0.7% experienced anaphylaxis, reported Nancy Agmon-Levin, MD, of Sheba Medical Center in Ramat-Gan, Israel, and colleagues.
After 218 of the highly allergic patients received the second dose, 1.8% experienced minor allergic reactions and none had anaphylaxis, the authors wrote in JAMA Network Open.
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Kansas Society of Interventional Pain Physicians ANNUAL MEETING
Location: Intercontinental
Kansas City at The Plaza
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The Honorable Kevin McCarthy,
U.S. House Minority Leader,
to Provide Keynote Address at CALSIPP
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CALSIPP is pleased to announce that
The Honorable Kevin McCarthy,
U.S. House Minority Leader, who represents California’s 23rd Congressional District, will provide our keynote address on Sunday, October 17 at 11:15 am (PST). Please be sure to stay through the duration
of the meeting so you do not miss this very important lecture.
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Room Block Update
We are in the process of adding more rooms to the block on Thursday, October 14 & Friday, October 15. If you still need to book for those nights, we recommend that you try again on or after Friday, September 3, using the link below.
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Sense of smell is deeply connected with cognitive function
COVID-19 knocks out smell and taste so often and so abruptly that it can serve as an early warning of virus surges. Now, according to researchers from the Alzheimer's Association International Conference, persistent anosmia 3 to 6 months after SARS-CoV-2 infection best predicted which older adults from the Andes mountains of Argentina had cognitive impairment.
Only longer-term follow-up will show if these cognitive losses resolve or progress as dementia. We should be unsettled that other researchers at the same meeting found that elderly patients hospitalized with COVID-19 who had toxic-metabolic encephalopathy also had some of the same plasma markers found in Alzheimer's and neuroinflammatory conditions: tau, phosphorylated tau, neurofilament light, glial fibrillary acid protein, and ubiquitin carboxyl-terminal hydrolase L1.
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We must speak out on issues impacting the well-being of our patients and ourselves
Like many baby-boomers who grew up in the era of the Vietnam War and protested it on college campuses, I came to resent authority and relish free speech. So, I was curious to read on MedPage Today that a Mayo Clinic doctor was fired for publishing a book that included criticism of Mayo's handling of the COVID-19 crisis. Apparently, the physician failed to follow Mayo's publication policy, which required Mayo officials to review the book prior to publication.
I also read about a pediatrician working as a health official in Tennessee. She was fired after she campaigned to get teens vaccinated for COVID-19 -- Tennesseans lag behind much of the nation in COVID-19 vaccination rates. Many other doctors have been fired or threatened termination from their jobs for speaking out against policies and practices that put patients at risk, and their concerns are not merely COVID-19 related. Judging by the experience of those physicians and the Mayo doctor, it appears that speaking out, especially about controversial issues, can result in career suicide. But none of this is new.
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ASIPP® is pleased to offer a new feature for
its members to help provide value to you and your practice.
Click here to visit ASIPP®'s newly created site where you can
make purchases on our Amazon Store, learn more about and
join the ASIPP® GPO and ASIPP®’s partnership with
Fedora Billing & Revenue Cycle Management Company.
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Almost one-third of patients in Italian study had musculoskeletal sequelae
Among patients who developed post-acute COVID-19 -- so-called "long COVID" -- almost one-third reported clinical features of fibromyalgia, Italian researchers reported.
In a web-based survey that included more than 600 patients, 30.7% met the American College of Rheumatology criteria for a fibromyalgia diagnosis at a mean of 6 months after having had COVID-19, said Francesco Ursini, MD, PhD, of the University of Bologna, and colleagues.
"In light of the overwhelming numbers of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, it is reasonable to forecast that rheumatologists will face a sharp rise in cases of a new entity that we defined as 'FibroCOVID,'" the researchers wrote online in RMD Open: Rheumatic & Musculoskeletal Diseases.
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Jessi Gold talks about how healthcare professionals can help themselves while helping others
When I like to think of compassion fatigue, I think we throw a lot of terms around, we use, like, burnout and moral fatigue and we use them all kind of interchangeably and they're quite different actually, but compassion fatigue itself is really like the cost of caring for someone.
So if you really are a person who's empathetic and you went into a caring profession where you are every single day, day in and day out, listening to people, taking care of somebody else, you end up taking on a lot of what they're feeling. And sometimes that can be really hard if what they're feeling is anger, and that can be really hard if it's not matching up with actually getting care, like if they're coming in not having done what they should -- quote, unquote -- be doing to get healthy themselves.
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St. Matthew, Ky.-based Commonwealth Pain & Spine was ordered to pay millions of dollars to the family of a former patient after a physician at the clinic allegedly cut the patient's pain medication prescription by 55 percent, according to a WDRB report.
Five details:
1. Brent Slone was a patient of Commonwealth Pain & Spine beginning in January 2014 after he had been experiencing pain from severe injuries related to a 2011 car crash.
2. In July 2017, Mr. Slone underwent surgery in California and then returned to Louisville, Ky., where he was hospitalized for a dislocated hip and given a small amount of pain medication. He sought an additional prescription from Commonwealth Pain and Spine in September.
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A proposed LCD on Epidural Procedures for Pain Management services was announced on June 10, 2021. This nationwide policy contains many onerous changes that will detrimentally affect patient access to care. ASIPP has written comment letters with detailed explanations of the issues and needed changes to each Medicare Contractor. The following are examples of the ASIPP comment letters:
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Pain Medicine Case Reports (PMCR) and Editor-in-Chief Alaa Abd-Elsayed, MD, PhD would like to invite you to submit case reports and case series to the PMCR journal. Your article will be published free of charge.
Open access journals are freely available online for immediate worldwide open access to the full text of published articles. There is no subscription fee for open access journals. Open access journals are no different from traditional subscription-based journals: they undergo the same peer-review and quality control as any other scholarly journal.
Interested in becoming a member of the PMCR Editorial Board?
Editorial board members are asked to review 2-6 manuscripts per year. Please submit your most up-to-date CV to sgold@asipp.org for consideration.
For more information or to submit your articles, click here.
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| CASE REPORT |
Mihir M. Kamdar, MD, Lathan W. McCall, MD, Ashley M. Saba, DPT,
and Brian J. Wainger, MD, PhD
Abstract
BACKGROUND: We present a patient with gait instability and pain due to chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN) who experienced marked improvement in motor function, proprioception, and pain following placement of a spinal cord stimulator (SCS).
CASE REPORT: A 62-year-old woman underwent placement of a permanent SCS after failing conservative therapy to manage her severe CIPN. Preoperatively, she reported significant gait instability in addition to her pain, typically suffering 10 falls per month. Postoperatively, she experienced a pronounced reduction in her pain level from 8 of 10 to 2 of 10 and in her number of falls from 10 to 0 per month. Furthermore, we formally assessed gait speed and function, Timed Up and Go (TUG) testing, postural control, and lower extremity function before and after SCS placement, and we found a profound improvement in all measurements.
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| META-ANALYSIS |
Wen-li Zhao, MD, Shao-dong Li, MD, Bei Wu, MD, and Zhen-Feng Zhou, MD
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Quadratus lumborum (QL) block has shown promising analgesic efficacy in the adult population in previous meta-analyses. However, the response of the pediatric group to pain stimulation is stronger than that in the adult population, and the management of pediatric pain is constrained by limited available analgesia agents. All data analyzed during this study are collected from published articles.
OBJECTIVE: The purpose of our systematic review was to evaluate whether QL block is also an effective postoperative analgesic technique, compared to other analgesic skills in pediatric patients undergoing lower abdominal surgery.
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| RANDOMIZED TRIAL |
Ludger Gerdesmeyer, MD, PhD, Carl Noe, MD,
Alexander Prehn-Kristensen, PhD, Norbert Harrasser, MD,
Munjed Al Muderis, MD, Matthias Weuster, MD, and Tim Klueter, MD
Abstract
BACKGROUND: No long-term follow-up data exist in any treatment for chronic radicular pain occurring with disc pathology and after failed back surgery. A previous randomized controlled trial (RCT) has proven efficacy in short-term follow-up as an evidence-based effective therapeutic option.
OBJECTIVES: Long term data is needed to determine the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of minimal invasive procedures. The present study reports 10-year follow-up results from the randomized trial.
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Since this malpractice insurance program officially launched in November 2018, ASIPP has signed up hundreds of providers with an average savings of 30%. This is professional liability insurance tailored to our specialty and will stand up for us and defend our practices.
Norcal Mutual is 'A' Rated by AM best and is license in all 50 states. To read a few important points to keep in mind about the program, including discounts, administrative defense, cyber coverage, aggressive claims handling, and complimentary award-winning risk management CME activities, click here.
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ASIPP® is now offering our members the benefit of a unique revenue cycle management/ billing service. We have received a tremendous amount of interest in the ASIPP® billing and coding program.
Click here to learn more about the negotiated rate for practices and more!
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ASIPP® has formed a partnership with Henry Schein and PedsPal, a national GPO that has a successful history of negotiating better prices on medical supplies and creating value-added services for the independent physician. Working with MedAssets, PedsPal provides excellent pricing on products like contrast media that alleviate some of the financial pressures you experience today.
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up-to-date news related to you, your practice, and your patients!
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