<span itemprop="author">L. Joseph Parker, MD

Author's posts

Why doctors risk jail time to treat pain and addiction

This is a strange time in America. While tools for treating pain and addiction, unchanged essentially from the late 1800s to the early 2000s, are now being developed, daring to try to utilize these medications and the science we have learned about them…

Physicians have a blind spot that makes them prone to fraud charges

Unlike almost every other industrialized nation on Earth, independent American physicians running their own clinics must all be entrepreneurs. Unlike all other businesses, however, there are special rules related to the business side of U.S. medical pr…

Opium wars to fentanyl crisis: a history of drug conflicts

Drug use has a complicated history in the Western World. Not quite two hundred years ago, starting in the Fall of 1839, Britain attacked the nation of China for having the audacity to ban an addictive substance, opium, that the British were selling to …

CRISPR and eEVs in the fight against chronic diseases

In one of my favorite movies, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, the original crew of the Enterprise has traveled through time, back to the, to them ancient, city of San Francisco circa the 1980s. It’s all about Earth whales and alien cetaceans being…

AI-powered surveillance in China and the U.S.

Today, in China, if you walk across the street where you are not supposed to, expect a ticket to arrive in the mail.  Somehow. Out of all the faces in China. An AI-monitored camera will see you and report your crime to the authorities. Lately, these fi…

From WWII to chronic pain: a family’s legacy of courage and sacrifice

Memorial Day just passed, and I reflected on those in my extended family who were lost in battle. My stepfather’s two brothers, whose names are carved in the World War II monument of a nearby small town, are most prominent in my mind. If I rememb…

The DEA’s latest targets: doctors treating addiction instead of pain

I have been writing for a while about how the DEA will run out of targets for opioid prosecutions because most doctors are too terrified to treat pain, and now it looks like it has happened. Three doctors in Tennessee were recently convicted of prescri…

Doctors or criminals? How misleading narratives hurt innocent lives

When it comes to journalism and health care prosecutions, today’s “papers” are so yellow that they could damage vision like a 580 nm laser. I have personally seen and suffered from this unbalanced approach to reporting and felt a need to provide …

Doctors or criminals? How misleading narratives hurt innocent lives

When it comes to journalism and health care prosecutions, today’s “papers” are so yellow that they could damage vision like a 580 nm laser. I have personally seen and suffered from this unbalanced approach to reporting and felt a need to provide …

Xylazine: the lethal ingredient hiding in your pills

Xylazine has been found to be adulterating pills in America, and doctors will need to understand this new threat. First, xylazine is not “krokodil,” although it produces somewhat similar-looking skin ulcers.  Krokodil is a pseudonym for des…