Has anyone here watched Dopesick? It's about the opioid crisis focusing on Purdue Pharma and how they aggressively marketed oxy to doctors. I haven't finished the show yet but I cannot get over how you could replace oxy with something like "gender affirming care" and it would be EXACTLY the same thing.

The first parallel that really struck me is one of the characters saying to an investigator that the entire way opioids are being spoken about has changed - i.e. the connotations are not negative anymore. There's the obvious similarity here with the way that we now talk about giving children off label drugs, encouraging people to have unnecessary surgeries, giving them medication that is not good for their bodies, but what also really resonated with me is the way the oxy sales people talk to the doctors about pain. They approach it from a very moralistic, almost SJW angle. For example they say things like "well no one wants their patients to be in pain, no one wants that" but it's phrased to sound like "you're a bad person if you don't prescribe oxy for your patients, because if you don't prescribe it, it obviously means you want them to be in pain and that makes you a bad person." it's very similar to how people are told they are bad and contributing to the suicide rates of TIPs if they don't affirm immediately, if they don't give blockers and hormones.

Then there's other things like the sales people being told, "there's a new study which says that oxy isn't addictive and that patients on less than 60mg can just stop without being weaned off" and they just repeat that to doctors who repeat it to other doctors and patients and it creates this cycle where no one is actually doing any actual research and everyone just claims that the studies show things which no one has ever verified that they do indeed show.

There's also things like Purdue introducing the "pain assessment" scale into hospitals (a graphic that patients can use to rate their pain on a scale of 1 to 10) which reminded me of the Barbie/GI Joe scale from Mermaids, and the buzzwords/phrases that they tell doctors to use like "individualise the dose" and "pain is the fifth vital sign" which the doctors just end up also repeating back and forth without much real thought as to what it means, much like they do with "live as your true authentic self", "born in the wrong body" and "sex assigned at birth".

Furthermore there's the sales people muddying the waters with hospitals and pharmacies, implying that they can be sued if they don't carry oxy, making doctors and pharmacists too scared to say no in case they are sued by patients.

I'm only three episodes in so far but it's absolutely shocking how we have wandered out of one medical scandal and straight into another one, potentially even more devastating.

ETA: they also make conditions up when something goes wrong, so for example they'll say that oxy lasts for 12 hours. When it doesn't they'll call the pain "breakthrough pain" and prescribe more oxy to deal with the "breakthrough pain". And the next minute every doctor and pharmacist and nurse is talking about "breakthrough pain" like this is a condition and everyone knows about it, much like the way we can't step outside our doors now without hearing about "gender dysphoria" etc.