Are You Living in the Matrix?

By Dr. Lynn Webster, PNN Columnist

A recent Netflix documentary, "The Social Dilemma," illustrates how social media networks are selling each of us as commodities to advertisers. Tristan Harris, a former Google employee, points out that platforms such as Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram make money by allowing advertisers to target members who are interested in their products or services.

That means anyone who uses "free" social media are not just consumers. We are the products being sold.

We’re allowing our brains to be manipulated by sophisticated marketing and artificial intelligence (AI) designed to change our behavior. Each time we “like” something or stay on a web page for more than a second, we provide technology companies with additional knowledge about who we are and what makes us tick. Each click helps AI become better at manipulating us, deciding what we see and what we don’t.

Because the things that fill one person's newsfeed may never make their way into another’s, social media networks shape our version of reality while they polarize society. Unfortunately, “fake news” is sometimes more profitable to advertisers than real news. We have segued from living in the Information Age to subsisting in the Disinformation Age. This is especially frightening when we see how much influence conspiracy theories have in our culture today.  

According to the documentary, we have essentially isolated ourselves in a bubble of technology. Loneliness and depression are rampant in our society, and people interact less in the real world than they do online. When others "like" our posts, we get a hormonal rush of chemicals -- and when it dissipates, we crave another hit. The need for approval and belonging keeps us clicking.

As "The Social Dilemma" asks, "How do you wake up from the matrix when you don't know you are in the matrix?"

People with Pain Live in the Matrix, Too

The online audience for messages has become fragmented for people with different views. This limits the reach of any particular message to those who share the same beliefs or problems. That puts people living with pain who reach out to others through social media at a disadvantage they may not even understand.

The documentary makes the point that the only industry besides social media that uses the term “users” is the illicit drug world. People living with pain or addiction are vulnerable to the same dopamine rush that keeps us clicking to receive affirmation from others who share our experiences.

People in pain desperately want to be heard by people who can help them. But, because of AI, only those who already tend to be supportive of people in pain are likely to see their posts.

The very nature of chronic pain and addiction narrows people’s worlds. So does social media. It has a compounding effect. As a society, we need to understand that our world becomes narrower with each click.

Think of those you unfriend or the people who block you on social media. They are the ones you need to hear from, because they are people who have different views from yours. It may feel comfortable to stay within your own lane, but that won't help if your goal is to understood the world and help change it for the better.   

Bursting Your Information Bubble

There are general principles we can all use to sort the truth from the lies on the internet. One is to recognize that if you have a strong emotional response to an online message, you may have become the successful target of manipulation. Take a deep breath and tell yourself the manipulators found a way to trigger your dopamine release. Remember that the message you saw may be only partially true -- or not true at all.

Before you share a post or believe it yourself, verify the source. Check out the veracity of the story on Snopes or some other fact checker. Seek out sources other than those that appear in your timeline or on your news feed. Instead of trusting your search engine, proactively log onto news sites with opposing viewpoints.

If the stories you find feature quotes, go to the original source and see if the message was taken out of context. The greater your emotional reaction to the message, the greater the chances are that it is inaccurate, misleading information.

“The Social Dilemma” website offers a toolkit to “realign your relationship with technology” and explore these issues -- including what social media is doing to our democracy -- more deeply.

We can't ban the internet. We wouldn't want to, even if we could. There are obvious benefits to digital communication, and we can't put the genie back into the bottle.

However, if we don’t want to be trapped in a dystopia where humanity is controlled by a manipulated reality, we have to realize that "free" online services are anything but that. The cost is the truth. When we sacrifice a balanced view of the world because of our desire to belong, we risk locking ourselves in the matrix. 

Lynn R. Webster, MD, is a vice president of scientific affairs for PRA Health Sciences and consults with the pharmaceutical industry. He is author of the award-winning book The Painful Truth, and co-producer of the documentary It Hurts Until You Die. Opinions expressed here are those of the author alone and do not reflect the views or policy of PRA Health Sciences. You can find Lynn on Twitter: @LynnRWebsterMD. 

Social Media’s Role in the Opioid Epidemic

By Douglas and Karen Hughes, Guest Columnists

Drug epidemics since 1900 are dynamic and our hyper-information age makes ours even more pronounced. The so-called “opioid epidemic” is contingent upon socioeconomic demand and available drug supply. To fully understand it, we must look beyond opioid medication as the sole contributing factor.

Social media could be one cause that everyone has overlooked.

Overprescribing of opioids was initially the problem and it helped fill numerous medicine cabinets. Coincidentally, this occurred at about the same time as the explosion of cell phones, texting and social media, and the resultant peer-driven social narrative.

Instantaneous information exchange brought teenagers into contact with “high school druggies” — which their pre-cell phone parents knew only as a separate social group. Contact with them was taboo. Today, however, everyone is part of the larger social narrative.

Relating the euphoria of opioid use in open forums caused adolescents, who already feel indestructible, to rebel by trying them. These impressionable youth become attracted to opioids in the same way their parents were attracted to alcohol, tobacco and marijuana. This sent teens scrambling to find a free sample in grandmother’s medicine cabinet.

Many renowned physicians believe addictive personalities are actually formed by a genetic predisposition to addiction. All that is needed is some substance to abuse. Alcohol is usually the gateway drug for adolescents, the “first contact” for many teens. Forgotten opioids in a medicine cabinet only come later. Addicts will often say, “My drug use began with a prescription opioid.” But addiction experts know the battle was already lost if there was no intervention after “first contact” with drugs.

Society has long blamed overprescribing for the opioid epidemic, but the last three years have proven that to be a red herring. The mass closing of pill mills in 2015, the CDC opioid guideline in 2016, and the steep reduction in opioid production that followed in 2017 have only accelerated the epidemic. Forcing disabled intractable pain sufferers to suffer or self-medicate was not the solution.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention postulated that overprescribing caused the opioid epidemic because they only had clinical evidence for short term opioid therapy. Instead of opening a wider dialogue and seeking more evidence, the lack of critical long-term studies was used as an excuse to limit prescribing. Statistical manipulation of overdose deaths was used to confirm this errant policy.

This is emblematic of all investigations into our present drug problems. Society ran the fool’s errand that one blanket policy could be found for hundreds of diverse regional and local drug problems.

The opioid epidemic most likely emanated from widely accepted alcohol use and the social lure of opioids by adolescents. It has little to do with patients.

Douglas and Karen Hughes live in West Virginia. Doug is a disabled coal miner and retired environmental permit writer. Karen retired after 35 years as a high school science teacher.

Pain News Network invites other readers to share their stories with us. Send them to editor@painnewsnetwork.org.

The information in this column should not be considered as professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. It is for informational purposes only and represents the author’s opinions alone. It does not inherently express or reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of Pain News Network.

Social Media Lowers Depression Risk for Pain Patients

By Pat Anson, PNN Editor

Seniors citizens who have chronic pain are significantly less likely to suffer from depression if they participate in an online social network, according to a new study.

Researchers at the University of Michigan reviewed the results of a 2011 survey of more than 3,400 Medicare patients aged 65 and older, in which respondents were asked about their depression, pain and social participation. About 17% of the seniors used an online social network in the previous month.

Researchers found that seniors who had chronic pain were often depressed, socially isolated and less likely to participate in activities that require face-to-face interaction.

However, online social participation appeared to buffer the impact of pain on depression. Seniors in pain who did not use an online social network were twice as likely to become depressed.

“The results suggest that for those in pain, it may be possible that online social participation can compensate for reduced offline social participation, especially where it pertains to the maintenance of mental health and well-being. This is critical because the onset of pain can often lead to a ‘downward spiral’ of social isolation and depression, resulting in adverse outcomes for the health of older adults,” wrote lead author Shannon Ang, a doctoral candidate at the U-M Department of Sociology and Institute for Social Research.

“Online social participation serves as a way to possibly arrest the development of pain toward depression through this pathway, by ensuring that older adults remain socially connected despite the presence of pain.”

Social media may also preserve cognitive function and psychological well-being in the elderly, researchers said. The findings are significant in an aging society where social isolation and loneliness are key determinants of well-being.

"Our results may be possibly extended to other forms of conditions (e.g., chronic illnesses, functional limitations) that, like pain, also restrict physical activity outside of the home," Ang said.

The survey data did not identify what types of social media – such as Facebook or Twitter – were more effective in warding off depression and social isolation.

The study was published in the Journals of Gerontology.

FDA Monitors Social Media for Drug Abuse Trends

By Pat Anson, Editor

A recent letter in The New England Journal of Medicine sheds some light on how the Food and Drug Administration tracks changing patterns of drug use on Facebook, Twitter and other social media.

The FDA began monitoring social media – what it calls “proactive pharmacovigilance” – about a decade ago, primarily as an early warning system for adverse events involving medication.

More recently, the agency has used active surveillance of social media to study the abuse of opioid painkillers and gabapentinoids, a class of nerve medication that includes gabapentin (Neurontin) and pregabalin (Lyrica). Gabapentinoids are increasingly being prescribed as “safer” alternatives to opioids.

“To understand why usage patterns are shifting, the FDA used a social media ‘listening platform’ to set up a dashboard to track traditional social media sites (such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, blogs, and forums) that we monitor for conversations about opioids,” explained FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD, and co-authors Douglas Throckmorton, MD, and Janet Woodcock, MD, two senior FDA officials.

“When we find mention of additional substances on social media or elsewhere, we conduct more specific searches for relevant, publicly available conversations through our listening platform, as well as through Reddit, Google, and various online forums that don’t require registration or subscription. These may include forums associated with drug misuse or abuse, such as Bluelight.org and talk.drugabuse.com.”

What did the FDA learn about gabapentinoids on social media? Preliminary findings indicate the abuse of gabapentinoids isn’t widespread, but their use continues to increase, especially for gabapentin.

The FDA is also actively monitoring the social media sites of kratom vendors. As PNN reported last month, one vendor received a warning letter from the FDA for sharing on its Facebook page a CNN story about the herbal supplement as a possible treatment for pain and opioid addiction. The vendor only said the story was “positive news for kratom,” but the FDA said that amounted to the illegal marketing of an unapproved drug.

“The FDA thus faces challenges as we confront the opioid crisis and monitor changing patterns of use, abuse, and misuse of other products,” Gottlieb wrote. “The right approach to regulating these substances is best determined through a multifaceted system of pharmacovigilance, using various tools to mine traditional and new sources of epidemiologic data, assess products’ pharmacologic properties, and evaluate the social contexts in which substances are being used.”

To be clear, the FDA’s surveillance of social media isn’t very different from what private enterprise is already doing. NUVI, for example, provide social media monitoring to companies “to get real-time insights into what people are saying about your brand online.”  Companies also sell software that track keywords, hashtags and user profiles on social media. And PatientsLikeMe, the largest online patient network with over 600,000 members, sells some of its data to the FDA and healthcare industry.

At PNN, we do stories all the time about opioids, kratom, gabapentinoids and other drugs. Is Pain News Network under surveillance by the FDA? Are reader comments on our website and social media being monitored? We don’t know. But in an age of growing concern about Internet privacy and the sharing of personal data, we thought you should know that the answer could be yes.

Counterfeit Pill Problem ‘Getting Worse by the Day’

By Pat Anson, Editor

Counterfeit painkillers and fake medications made with illicit fentanyl have killed Americans in at least 22 states, according to a new report by the Partnership for Safe Medicines (PSM) a coalition of pharmacy and healthcare organizations. Counterfeit pills laced with fentanyl have now been found from coast to coast in 43 states.

“This updated report shows that the illegally-imported fentanyl problem is getting worse by the day,” said Dr. Marvin Shepherd, chairman of the PSM Board.

Fentanyl is 100 times more potent than morphine. It is prescribed legally for severe pain, but illicit fentanyl has become a scourge on the black market, where it is typically mixed with heroin or cocaine. Rogue manufacturers also press it into counterfeit prescription pills such as Vicodin, Percocet and Xanax.

Unsuspecting buyers – including pain sufferers looking for relief -- often have no idea what they’re getting.

According to a recent CDC report, drug deaths involving fentanyl (19,413) surpassed overdoses linked to prescription opioids (17,087) in 2016.

COUNTERFEIT PERCOCET

“The annual count of overdose deaths from prescription opioids has remained constant since 2011, but deaths from fentanyl poisoning have spiked since then. As fentanyl-laced pills mimicking legitimate medication have flooded the illicit drugs supply, prescription drug users have been poisoned by the counterfeits,” the PSM report found. 

“The tally of deaths because of counterfeit pills made with fentanyl is probably undercounted because lab protocols lagged behind this shift and weren’t testing for fentanyl.”

The pills are difficult to trace, as Minnesota prosecutors admitted last week when they announced that no criminal charges would be filed in the accidental overdose death of Prince. The music icon died two years ago after taking counterfeit painkillers that were “an exact imitation” of Vicodin.

“Prince thought he was taking Vicodin and not fentanyl,” said Carver County Attorney Mark Metz, adding that dozens of counterfeit pills were found in Prince’s home, many of them stored in aspirin bottles.

Investigators were unable to determine how or where Prince obtained the fake pills, but they are readily available online for anyone who cares to look. According to one report, there are as many as 35,000 online pharmacies operating worldwide. Many do not require a prescription and are selling counterfeit medications. Their customers include some pain patients who are no longer able to obtain opioids legally from doctors and are looking for other sources.

‘Criminals Are Pretty Smart’

“They’re looking, maybe innocuously, for medicine online. They’re searching for ‘fentanyl online’ or ‘Percocet buy.’  Not because they want to buy medicine on the Internet, but rather they just want to find medicine,” says Libby Baney, Executive Director of the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies, an industry supported non-profit.

“The criminals are pretty smart. They know that there’s a market out there and they know they can offer these medicines to patients for good reasons, bad reasons or otherwise that are looking for those medicines. And they are going to get duped because they are very likely buying from a website that is selling it illegally.”

The National Association of Boards of Pharmacy recently evaluated 100 websites selling medications and found that almost all were operating illegally and selling drugs without a prescription. Over half (54%) were selling controlled substances and 40% were offering drugs that are frequently counterfeited with fentanyl.

The marketing and selling of counterfeit medicine goes beyond just online pharmacies. Drug dealers are increasingly using Facebook, Twitter and message boards to reach customers. PNN recently received this sales pitch from one dealer:

"We have pharmaceutical drugs for your health illness especially for Chronic Pain, Anxiety, Depression, Panic Disorder. ADHD, Xanax Bars, Narcolepsy pills, Antidepressants, Antipsychotics, Benzodiazepines, Narcotics, Opiates, weight loss/fat burner. We do overnight secure shipping."

Warning unsuspecting buyers about the easy availability of these drugs poses a dilemma for law enforcement and policy makers.

“We have ethical tension around all of this. On the one hand, we certainly don’t want to be educating people that you can buy controlled substances or prescription drugs on the Internet without a prescription, counterfeit or otherwise. That’s just dangerous. But we also don’t want to be in a position of not warning them or not making a policy response to the fact that this currently exists,” Baney told PNN.

It is relatively easy to tell the difference between a legitimate online pharmacy and an illegal one. The URL’s for websites that end with “.Pharmacy” (not .com or .net) are certified by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy and are in compliance with laws and practice standards. You can also visit buysaferx.pharmacy to verify whether a website is legitimate.