Deal would also require multibillionaire family to give up ownership of the Connecticut-based firm

A federal bankruptcy court judge on Friday said he would approve OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma’s latest deal to settle thousands of lawsuits over the toll of opioids that includes some money for thousands of victims of the epidemic.

The deal overseen by US bankruptcy judge Sean Lane would require some of the multibillionaire members of the semi-reclusive Sackler family who own the company to contribute up to $7bn and give up ownership of the Connecticut-based firm.

The new agreement replaces one the US supreme court rejected last year, finding it would have improperly protected members of the family against future lawsuits. The judge said he would explain his decision in a hearing on Tuesday.

  • lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
    1·
    7 hours ago

    On a good day they are at 3/10, bad day 8/10 on the 0 to 10 pain scale.

    Those pain scales are subjective junk that motivated the opioid epidemic from when special interests pushed that “5th vital sign” bullshit.

    This story covers how

    • Pain is not just a medical issue but a cultural and psychological phenomenon.
    • Attention amplifies pain; ignoring it can reduce its impact.
    • Effective treatment may require balancing resilience with emotional expression.

    Historically, physicians have regarded pain as “an inevitable part of life”, “not usually an emergency like low blood pressure or an erratic heartbeat”, and definitely not a vital sign.

    Then in 1995, the American Pain Society started a campaign referring to pain as the '5th vital sign', which caught on with medical bureaucracies and the pharmaceutical industry.

    CAMPBELL: Well, strictly speaking, pain wouldn’t be a vital sign because a vital sign would be a manifestation of the physiological functioning in the body that’s vital to life. So it’s vital in the sense of being associated with being alive.

    SPIEGEL: But Dr. Campbell still thought elevating the status of pain would do more good than harm. And since, in 1995, he was president of a medical organization called the American Pain Society, he used his presidential address to launch a campaign, and the idea caught fire. Over the next few years, lots of groups made pain a priority. The Veterans Health Administration put out a toolkit for doctors that emphasized pain as the fifth vital sign. The Federation of State Medical Boards encouraged doctors to systematically measure patient pain. And importantly, JCAHO, the main organization that offers accreditation to hospitals, published a document that emphasized the importance of assessing and treating patient pain. Dr. Campbell had helped to launch a revolution. It’s just like a genius marketing move.

    CAMPBELL: It was really amazing because it transformed medicine.

    SPIEGEL: But not in a purely positive way. Some people now argue that this small bureaucratic shift in medical practice and the way that it taught doctors and patients to see pain as a critical problem to be solved led ultimately to the opioid epidemic. After all, when doctors are expected to ask about pain, it’s hard not to give medications if a patient reports a high score. And several drug companies that made pain pills were quietly funding these initiatives. In fact, Dr. Campbell set up a pain awareness group that got a decade of financial backing from Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin. In congressional hearings on the opioid crisis, Dr. Campbell called the support, quote, “generous,” though the pain group’s chief executive later added that funders do not influence its work.

    What is beyond debate, however, is that conceiving of pain as the fifth vital sign and asking patients about their pain number meant that pain got a lot more attention than it ever had before. And here’s the thing about attention that most of us don’t fully appreciate. Attention is not a neutral force. It invariably changes the thing that it purports to observe. Often, it makes that thing bigger. Attention can change all kinds of things, even the physical response of the body - which brings us back to Devyn and her pain.

    Society is still paying the deleterious consequences.