Wha….?
The 17-month investigation culminated with the arrest of Dr. Tyron Reece, a 71-year-old general practitioner who runs a solo practice in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood.
Reece wrote 920,000 prescriptions last year for hydrocodone, which is commonly sold under the brand names Vicodin and Lortab, authorities said. That averages to 35 prescriptions a day, typically for 100 pills each.
via Doctor Charged In Mexico, U.S. Prescription Drug Ring | FoxNews.com.
Umm, 92,000,000 narcotic pills. 92 Million. Wow.
Um, none of these numbers make sense.
Off by a factor of 100 somewhere.
Try 920,000 x 100. My calculator spits out 92 million.
Or, do you believe the news report is incorrect?
Given this from Answers.com (to the question, how many work hours in a year):
Full year (no leave)
Work hours — 2,088
Work week — 52.2
Work days — 261
960,000/2088=459.77 prescriptions per hour. Agree, seems high.
Given 60 minutes in an hour, that’s 7.7 prescriptions a minute. It would take a production to copy and sign that many a minute, for that time, let alone see a patient now and then.
So, yeah, the numbers are suspect.
I suppose with an operation that big he could have had a large number of people working for him, “writing” and rubber-stamping the prescriptions.
Hard to be sure what they are counting. It well could be on the order of 1 paper script for 100 pill/month, refill authorized for a year would count as 12 separate scripts. There was a large push a few years back to lower cost for chronic pain patients (often they are worker’s comp or some other form of disability). Part of this push was for docs to write scripts for large number of pills, and renew them automatically. The theory was “greedy docs seeing a patient every month for pills he has taken for years with no problems.”
The amount of oral pain meds some chronic pain patients take daily is truly astounding.
I wonder if this doc once had Elvis as a patient?
Unless the numbers are way off, as the good posters above me said, I am pretty sure that this man did not write all those prescriptions alone.
Although the main article does not clarify, it is reasonable to assume that he had some kind of clinic with other “doctors” writing prescriptions with his name on them.