George Washington and Morton Glasser
At Touro Synagogue August 26, 2017
Rabbi Marc Mandel welcomed everyone and made brief remarks,
“This week, millions of Americans witnessed a rare event-a total solar eclipse. As reported in Business Insider, Rabbi Martin Hier, my neighbor in Los Angeles, had this to say about the eclipse. ‘The moon is 400 times smaller that the sun, yet the moon had the capacity to do a complete eclipse on the sun. Now that should teach us about bigots and haters who started out as small groups.’ He said that fanatics and bigots can darken our planet. The United States ‘caught on late’ to the Nazi movement in Europe in the 1930s. ‘Let’s not catch on late now.’
“Rabbi Hier is delivering an important message. We have to be on guard because, even though George Washington wrote to our community in 1790, ‘That the United States gives to bigotry no sanction and to persecution no assistance,’ things don’t always turn out that way.
“In fact Gordon Wood, who used to be a professor at Brown University, points out that George Washington was exaggerating, because in 1790 it was only the national government that had forsaken all religious tests and qualifications, but a majority of the states still had an established church and many of them continued to discriminate against some religious denominations.
“In our society today, there are those who are not tolerant and are not interested in a society that embraces all cultures. And what about the worlds of social media? On Facebook and Twitter people can write whatever they want-and very often there is no tolerance at all for other people, just anger and hatred and even threats. So we need to be careful about the future. The Talmud says that an eclipse can be a warning of things to come.
“Let us hope and pray that the upcoming year will bring us blessings and success and let us continue to work together, with all people of good will, to build a just society where all people can sit peacefully under their fig trees, with none to harm them.”
The Kiddish was sponsored by Drs Irene and Morty Glasser in honor of their family. Dr. Morton Glasser spoke about how the Generations Family Health Center in Connecticut, where he is the Chief Medical Officer, has helped people rid themselves of their addictions to prescription opiates for chronic pain and/or refrain from initiating the use of prescription opiates for chronic pain. The use of prescription opiates is one of the many causes of the current US drug epidemic.
It’s a weighty topic. Dr. Glasser traced the abuse of prescription opioids to a couple of things. There was a belief, since discredited, that prescription opioids had a low abuse potential, and there was a belief that pain was under-treated.
Drug companies knew a good thing when they saw it. They funded the American Academy of Pain Management and the American Pain Society. The number of pain clinics increased. Medical guidelines were published in 1998 and 2004 that were widely adopted and made the use of opioids a standard pain treatment. Under the guidelines, a doctor could be accused of malpractice if he failed to prescribe.
A chart posted in doctors offices and emergency rooms explained to patients a way to describe their pain on a scale of 1-10 with a smiley face at one end and a sad face at the other end. People who were addicted quickly learned how to manipulate the system to get their meds.
The result of all of this was a large increase in the number of prescriptions for opioids, and of people addicted to them.
Dr. Turner, an emergency room doctor visiting from Florida, confirmed what Dr. Glasser said. The visiting doctor mentioned that many of the deaths from opioids are among former addicts who relapsed. They overdosed themselves by going back to their original dosage, not realizing that their bodies were no longer acclimated to high doses. Both doctors agreed that patients who became addicted to prescription narcotics often turn to illegal drugs such has heroin and illicit versions of fentanyl, which are much less expensive than prescription drugs if they are not covered by insurance.
About 5 years ago, Dr. Glasser realized that his clinic was overprescribing opioids. He gave the clinic’s doctors six months to wean their patients off. The patients were in an uproar at first, but eventually felt much better. They would be offered alternate methods of treatment including physical therapy, non-opioid pain medications, and TENS (Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) units. About 27% of the patients left the practice to try to obtain the medications elsewhere, but many of them eventually returned.
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| From "The Medical Merry-Go-Round, A Plea for Resonable Medicine," by Morton Glasser and Gretel Pelto, 1980 |
Dr Glasser and his clinic were a bit ahead of the curve, and there were complaints from emergency rooms that his clinics lack of prescribing put more pressure on the ERs.
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