A proprietary machine learning algorithm (AvertD) claims that it can determine your risk for opioid use disorder based on your genetics. The test is meant to be used to inform prescribing decisions—so doctors will decide if they can give you powerful painkillers based on the results. As of 2023, it can be marketed and sold, according to the FDA. There’s just one problem: Researchers say its prediction is no better than chance and will lead to clinical harms.
The algorithm received premarket approval (PMA), which requires that the FDA has found “sufficient valid scientific evidence to assure that the device is safe and effective.” But according to a new study in JAMA Network Open, the genetics model is about as useful as a coin flip. By contrast, simply accounting for age and sex was about eight times better at predicting opioid abuse.
“Candidate genetic variants from the approved genetic risk algorithm do not meet standards of reasonable clinical efficacy in assessing risk of opioid use disorder,” the researchers write.
The study was led by Christal N. Davis and Henry R. Kranzler at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. They don’t hold back in their critique, taking the creators of AvertD to task for failing to understand basic applied genetics:
“The issues identified herein suggest that the manufacturer has a fundamental misunderstanding of genetic principles,” the researchers write.
And they aren’t the only ones critiquing AvertD. In late 2024, 153 experts in psychiatric genetics signed their name to an article in Lancet Psychiatry expressing concerns about the misuse of genetic data and the possibility of clinical harms after its FDA approval.
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Someone with a pair of arms and hands is more likely to be a heroin abuser then someone without arms or hands, but that doesn’t mean arms and hands cause opioid use disorder. Next….
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The one answer to mental health problems and indeed all the problems of life and health is this thing we call freedom, which means living without restraint. Freedom is explosive for a repressed person in the beginning, and may even be dangerous, but this is the energy of the organism bursting back through and it is these energies that are the energies of living – AND healing.
Why has sex become so all dominating and important to the modern Western psyche? Because we demand to LIVE. Living implies freedom, otherwise it is not living – it is functioning. Even your leisure trips to the shopping mall and the restaurant is functional: you need these things in order to give the organism a semblance of living, otherwise it crumbles inwardly and becomes depressed, which is what you call mental illness. It is not mental illness at all but the denial of LIVING. In sex we live: in sex we feel free, so all the life energies get attracted to that, but if we understand the problem of living a little more perhaps we’ll break through the wall of sex and drugs.
Dancing freely is also living. Singing your heart out is living unless it is a performance, and then it is just that – a performance, which is function. You long for the melting of your functional existence into the one free life, but the social historical process has made our whole world functional. But destruction is living! So let’s tare it all down and reclaim our nature and become nature like we always really were. Everybody must have freedom. You fear freedom of the evil but the evil are the most free in the society, and the good most enslaved and disempowered – until they become free, which implies natural. Their freedom in this society may be agony, as it is for me, but that agony is the energy of the true revolution which is each of us ourselves becoming free. And you don’t need a book to become free. You can work it all out yourself, starting from right now. In freedom you begin to observe and understand yourself in that freedom, and it is this understanding that transforms and heals. Then this consciousness gradually transforms into the origin and goal of all things.
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“Freedom is explosive for a repressed person in the beginning, and may even be dangerous, but this is the energy of the organism bursting back through and it is these energies that are the energies of living – AND healing.” Very insightful and true, No-one.
That’s how I felt, once I’d been weaned off the psychiatric neurotoxins. That extra healing energy was probably, in part, due to a drug withdrawal induced “super sensitivity mania.” But it most definitely also had to do with being once again:
“Free at last, free at last
I thank God I’m free at last.”
https://genius.com/Martin-luther-king-jr-free-at-last-annotated
Gotta love a great public speaker and pastor, with whom I share a birthday. But it is sad that a religion named after Martin Luther is now “partnered with” the systemic child abuse covering up, control freaks, and scientifically “invalid” neurotoxic poisoners of the “mental health professions.”
And it’s also sad that our mainstream medical community deluded themselves into believing opioids were “safe pain meds,” and went off believing all the “BS” lies of the psychiatrists.
Pardon my continued disgust at the continuing modern day “psychiatric holocaust.” An old friend asked me to come to a celebration of life for her parents, so I had to return to my ex-religion. And in as much as it was nice to see some of my old youth group friends, none of whom attend that church now. It was very uncomfortable being around the systemic child abuse covering up, attempted thieving, old people who are running that beautiful old church into the ground.
But I agree,
“Dance, then, wherever you may be,
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,
and I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be,
and I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said he.”
That is exactly what one does when they escape the satanic psychiatric system. And let’s pray us truth tellers “lead them all in the dance” that leads to common sense, and hopefully someday wisdom. I pray to God, for an end to our modern day psychological and psychiatric industries’ holocaust of millions of innocent humans.
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I wouldn’t mind seeing you leading the dance Someone Else! I wouldn’t mind personally if you took charge of the whole field of psychiatry: no doubt it’d give Satan a much needed break.
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Peter,
This sounds just like the GARS (Genetic Addiction Risk Score) developed by Ken Blum, who coined the term “Reward Deficiency Syndrome”. You can see the SNPs used here…
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4225054/
I spoke out against it years ago because:
1. His initial paper on Taq1A being the “alcoholism gene” had been proven wrong shortly after he wrote it.
2. Some of the SNPs included in the GARS had failed studies and were unproven.
3. He was trying to sell the supplement he created, a dopamine agonist, to treat those “at risk of addiction” which included people with PTSD, BPD, autism, ADHD, schizophrenia, Bipolar disorder, depression and obesity.
4. He wanted to use the GARS to treat CHILDREN with the dopamine agonist which had shown to cause uncontrolled gambling.
When I heard he wanted to treat Veterans I went and told him what I thought.
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