Pill Mills Are Not Clinics

By Author: Thomas Strickland
Total Articles: 102
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The world should be an honest and reliable place so you can trust labels and the advertising that goes with it. Take the word "clinic" as an example. This should mean a smaller community medical establishment, run by qualified medical specialists. It will offer some inpatient care but mainly focus on outpatient care, usually concentrating on a particular medical condition, e.g. family planning or pain. So far so good. Obviously, hospitals also set up small units which are called clinics and, out in the countryside where hospitals can be a long way off, clinics represent the only local resource for all aspects of medical care. Except the word has become a cloak of respectability for the so-called pill mills, clinics that give doctors a bad name.

The accepted definition of a pill mill is a place where prescription drugs are sold, often at reduced prices for non-medical reasons. Put another way, they sell narcotics and so fuel drug abuse in the neighborhood. If these were legitimate, they would actually be providing a useful service to the community by undercutting the retail prices charged by local pharmacies. So often ...
... the people in the poorer parts of town find even the routine drugs unaffordable from local drugstores. But the sad reality is that these "clinics" abuse the prescription system and give drugs away like candy. The most usual label is as a "pain management clinic". If true, this would be a benefit. Unfortunately, these places open, trade in cash for a few weeks or months, and then close before enforcement action closes in. Although you will find examples of this phenomenon in most large cities, the main concentration has been discovered in Florida and Texas.

You can always tell whether you are in a legitimate clinic. The law requires doctors to identify a real medical problem before drugs can be prescribed. So if a clinic offers you drugs without giving you any kind of medical exam and there's a long line of people queuing, you are probably in one of the illegals. Just so you understand the scale of the problem, the abuse or overdose of prescription drugs is now the second most common cause of accidental death after traffic accidents. Although might think more people would die from the street drugs like heroin and meth, the FDA approved painkillers are the real killers.

So Florida has now imposed a moratorium on new clinics and is looking for ways in which to bring the problem under control. This does not change the real need for genuine pain management clinics, i.e. places which specialize in treating pain rather than the underlying physical problem causing it. As it is, people are either forced into self-medicating using Tramadol, or they are left to be treated by the doctors claiming the responsibility for the underlying physical cause. So you might have arthritis and be left to see the same doctor without any outside help. This not to deny the effectiveness of Tramadol or the more powerful painkillers. But it ignores all the alternative approaches to pain management (in the real medical sense of the words).