I get tested every month. At my first pain clinic I had so many weird test results that eventually they pretty much let me go. It was very strange but for about 4 months they kept telling me that my test did not show my medicines or it showed not enough of my medicines, Etc.
As I said earlier, I worked in this industry full time for several years and still do when called upon sometimes, designing the drug tests themselves and tried to teach the staffs of these labs how to understand the data which they are incredibly unqualified to interpret.
I will say this in plain english: YOU CANNOT EXTRAPOLATE ANY RELIABLE INFORMATION ABOUT A DRUGS QUANTITATIVE OR TEMPORAL DOSE PARAMETERS FROM A URINE DRUG TEST. A whole blood or serum test would be required to make any determination about your dosing from the results. There are scientific papers all over the medical and scientific journals supporting this conclusion. Most doctors I dealt with had to have this explained to them and I would send them copies of the studies
To your issues with the tests coming out wrong. I will explain how this industry works. The tests are run and results released by technicians which require absolutely zero training (in both their schooling and licencing exams) in the technology used for these tests (LCMS and GCMS). These data is not that simple to interpret and put out a result, you have to have half a brain. I've met technicians that were smart enough to learn on the job how to read this data. For many of them (more than half i would say) it is simply beyond their intellectual capabilities. They've been working in labs that do this testing for a decade and still have no idea how to read the data.
Many labs don't even have a human reading the data (this would take way too long for the amount of samples they run) thus the data is processed and your final result released by software. It is impossible for this software to be totally accurrate (it actually makes lots of mistakes), so a human should check any results that are in disagreement with what a patient should or shouldn't be taking, many labs don't spend the time to do this (or don't have staff that can) and release bad results.
The amount of bad results and unqualified personnel in this industry is very disturbing. Labs require a "director" which is usually an MD that has never visited the lab and with zero knowledge of of the science being used to aquire these results. He signs off on highly technical "validation" experiments (which I conducted) which support that the tests are working properly, without absolutely any clue as to what he is signing. The instruments are highly sensitive, breath on them wrong and they get out of tune, by that point I'm long gone and nobody in the lab has any clue that the results are coming out wrong or how to fix it. The validation data I gave the MD to sign, It could have been totally made up data and they won't know the difference. They get paid 2000$ a month for their signatures like this, PER LAB. I only ever came across one lab that had PhD in analytical toxicological chemistry as a director (this is what you want). I was so distrubed by what I saw consulting for various labs that I wrote a 3 page letter to the state board the licences individuals to conduct these tests, explaining what the situation is. The letter when ignored. I also wrote to state senators about this but they said they couldn't do anything about it.
As to the business side of things - its such a scam and I won't elaborate further right now
I don't know what can be done about this, but something has to be done to address the fact that patients lives are being ruined because of this bad testing.
OF COURSE lying to a patient is harmful and it's morally wrong.
