Boyfriend and psychiatrist convicted of conspiring to give model excessive amounts of prescription drugs—After a two month trial, a Los Angeles court convicted Howard K Stern and Khristine Eroshevich for conspiring to give her excessive amounts of painkillers, antidepressants and other prescription drugs.
Minnesota doctors are again under the microscope of an influential U.S. senator from Iowa — this time because of concerns that expensive medications are being overprescribed at great cost to the publicly funded Medicaid and Medicare programs. U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, notified federal authorities Wednesday that he found potential examples of overprescribing after requesting lists from states, including Minnesota, of doctors who issued the most prescriptions for antipsychotic and narcotic medications in 2008 and 2009.
Based on the huge numbers of prescriptions written by a Miami psychiatrist, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, is continuing to pressure federal officials to investigate why some doctors write stunning numbers of scripts for tax-funded Medicare and Medicaid programs. In his latest volley, a letter sent Wednesday to Kathleen Sebelius, secretary for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Grassley demanded exact answers to three pointed questions about what her department is doing to address the problem. “The federal government has an obligation to figure out what’s going on here,” Grassley said in a statement e-mailed to The Miami Herald Wednesday. “The taxpayers are footing the bill, and Medicare and Medicaid are already strained to the limit. These programs can’t spare a dollar for prescription drugs that aren’t properly prescribed.
Dr. Brent Forester, a geriatric psychiatrist at McLean, was one of the Massachusetts physicians paid the most last year, when he made $73,100 for giving nearly 40 talks for Eli Lilly to colleagues about the antipsychotic Zyprexa and the antidepressant Cymbalta over dinners in restaurants and in doctors offices. He has resigned from speakers bureaus to comply with the new rules, but said he “never felt like a spokesperson for the company at all.’’
I call it a return to fundamental self care. Traditional forms of healing. These are fundamental and should be available to everyone. The problem is the medical establishment. This goes against the grain of what is taught in medical schools and threatens their authority and the income of the drug companies. We have a system that essentially says even in the most basic matters of care, doctors and medicine knows best and that’s simply not true. Western medicine is wonderful. Antibiotics are miracles. But we tend to hope for the same kind of miracles for psychological conditions. The alternative is going back to basics and learning how to take better care of one’s self.