This won't end the opioid epidemic . . .

. . . but it might help. The CDC has come up with new guidelines for opioid prescribing in outpatient care which are heavily promoted in the leading medical journals. (The link is to NEJM, which proffers it for free to the subscriptionless rabble.)The story of how we got where we are is pretty well known, I think. But I'll recap it for convenience. Chronic pain (CP) is the most prevalent and expensive health condition in the United States, estimated to cost up to $635 billion per year in health care costs and lost productivity. Often pain is from osteoarthritis or other identifiable physical causes, but as I have discussed here previously, it can also be a malfunction in the brain-nervous system circuits that creates pain without an identifiable physical lesion. That makes effective treatment elusive. Obviously, having chronic pain can be a serious drag. It is associated with depression, social withdrawal, loss of employment. So, back in the 1990s a movement arose claiming that chronic pain was undertreated because doctors were too afraid to prescribe opioids. People claimed that when they were used to treat pain, people rarely became addicted, that there was little harm in long-term use, and that opioids were the magic balm that doctors were callously refusing to suffering people. No big surprise, the companies that make them sang the lead part in the chorus. So now we have an epidemic that is devastating communities all over the U.S., of overdose from prescription...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs