News Briefs
News Briefs
University hosts medical marijuana conference
The nation’s first meeting to discuss the therapeutic use of marijuana was held in early April at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.
The conference was held, according to organizers, in response to the federal government’s conclusions in last year’s report issued by the Institute of Medicine in Washington, DC. The advisory panel’s recommendations stated that marijuana helps fight pain and nausea and should be tested further through scientific trials.
The event was sponsored by the University of Iowa’s College of Medicine and College of Nursing with assistance from Howardsville, VA-based Patients Out of Time, an organization supporting the use of medical marijuana.
The national Compassionate Care Program, administered to 15 patients, was discontinued by the federal government in 1992, but some of the patients are allowed to continue using marijuana. Federal law prohibits physicians from prescribing marijuana, but seven states and the District of Columbia have passed legislation allowing physicians to recommend its use for certain diseases, such as glaucoma, multiple sclerosis, and cancer.
The government has to fight state laws because "if they give up their control and pass that control to the health care community, then they’re out of a job," says Al Byrne Jr., cofounder of Patients Out of Time. Byrne says he smokes marijuana to relieve eye pressure from glaucoma.
Fear of opiate drug use unfounded, study says
First, the good news: Opiate drug use to treat severe and chronic pain is increasing. Now, the better news: Fear of patients abusing such drugs is by and large unfounded. A report on opiate drug use in treating pain appeared in the April 5 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.
Pain experts suggest using opiate drugs to treat severe pain in cases such as trauma, surgery, or cancer because they are most effective. Critics fear, however, that prescribing those drugs might lead to abuse. Researchers report, in fact, that cases of drug abuse involving opioid analgesics actually decreased from 1990 to 1996.
Researchers based their conclusions on data from the Drug Abuse Warning Network, a database collecting information on drug abuse cases from hospital emergency departments nationwide. Five types of opioid analgesics were tracked: morphine, fentanyl, oxycodone, hydromorphone, and meperidine.
Morphine was the only drug abused more in 1996 with a 3% increase. Despite increases of use of most of those drugs, reports of abuse declined for the following: meperidine, 39%; oxycodone, 29%; fentanyl, 59%; and hydromorphone, 15%.
Internet health care gets code of ethics
An international code of ethics for Internet health care was drafted from a set of guiding principles during an eHealth Ethics Summit hosted by the Pan-American Health Organization Jan. 31-Feb. 2, 2000, in Washington, DC. The announcement was made by the Internet Healthcare Coa- lition. The code addresses privacy, commerce, content, services, disclosure, and the practice of health care on the Internet. The draft, which now contains additional notes and definitions, is available on the Coalition’s Web site: www.ihealthcoalition.org/ community/ethics.html. It will be revised and released for final publication by the middle of this month. It was created with input from consumers, patients, health care professionals, ethicists, dot-com entrepreneurs, academicians, special interest societies, manufacturers of regulated drugs and medical devices, governmental agencies, and international representatives.
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