Chronic Health Conditions Discussion and Support

Which means the Percodan will also help with an inflammatory response that Percocet won't address.

Neurontin was originally prescribed for epilepsy but the drug maker touted its off-label uses as amazing. One of these off-label uses was for chronic pain. I remember giving it as a nurse and my patients were in pain and the drug reps told the docs that they just needed to keep increasing it and if it didn't work, it was only because the patient didn't want it to work. It was one of the biggest shams in medicine and frankly, if a doctor gives you Neurontin for an off-label use, I would request a different medication.

It still pisses me off at the fact that so many patients were made to suffer because of Pfizer's greed...and the fact that some of those patients were mine.

http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Huge-penalty-in-drug-fraud-Pfizer-settles-2759293.php

>>>>snip
A division of Pfizer Inc., the world's largest drugmaker, has agreed to plead guilty to two felonies and pay $430 million in penalties to settle charges that it fraudulently promoted the drug Neurontin for a string of unapproved uses.

In an agreement announced by government prosecutors Thursday, Pfizer unit Warner-Lambert admitted that it aggressively marketed the epilepsy drug by illicit means for unrelated conditions including bipolar disorder, pain, migraine headaches, and drug and alcohol withdrawal.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Huge-penalty-in-drug-fraud-Pfizer-settles-2759293.php#ixzz2BkXVLBJo


Also wanted to add this:
http://www.pbmattorneys.com/news.php?action=view&id=13
>>>snip
Harris Pogust, cochair of ATLA’s new Neurontin Litigation Group, said his firm in Pennsauken, New Jersey, has filed two such cases and sees potential clients daily. The harm done by Neurontin’s off-label use, he noted, extends well beyond suicide. The drug company conducted two clinical trials on Neurontin’s use as a treatment for bipolar disorder, he said. One showed that a placebo was as good as Neurontin; the other showed that the placebo worked better than the drug. But the company continued to promote Neurontin as an off-label treatment for bipolar disorder.

Pogust compared Parke-Davis’s conduct to “coming into the house of a bipolar patient on lithium,” removing the lithium from his or her medicine cabinet, “and saying, ‘You’re not going to be medicated. See what happens.’”

The complaint and sentencing memorandum from Franklin’s lawsuit help explain why a drug the FDA approved for only two relatively obscure uses now accounts for almost $3 billion of its maker’s approximately $50 billion annual revenues.

According to both of the documents, Parke-Davis promoted the drug for off-label uses to get as much revenue as possible while the drug was still under patent and to make sure that any competing generics would have limited use—instead of spending critical time and money to conduct studies and obtain FDA approval for those uses.