Don ’t let the opioid crisis affect the treatment course for your patients

Mrs. Smith is an 81-year-old female. She worked a long time doing very physical work and is now on a fixed income and comes to my office with chronic pain. X-rays show she has degenerative arthritis in her hips, knees and lumbar spine. She has taken Norco twice a day for years and has been able to be very stable on this. She has always been compliant with her medications. She has not lost them or had them stolen. She lives with her husband, and they use a safe where they keep their medications. The patient has done well with acupuncture and massage in the past but is not able to afford these, and her insurance doesn’t cover these services. The main reason she was referred to our clinic is that her primary care provider is refusing to prescribe her medications as they do not want to prescribe long-term opioids. I work in interventional pain management, and we provide a lot of interventional services that can help decrease pain for a lot of patients. We also take care of people who are on chronic pain medications. With the opioid “crisis” there have been a lot of providers who no longer believe in pain. Pain has gone from the fifth vital sign to a non-existent symptom which has left a lot of patients who are in pain to suffer. We’ve come to a point where we have found that there is an issue with opioid medications, but no one wants to come up with a solution. We have options for alternative treatments that have been found to help people with chronic pain, but unfort...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - Category: General Medicine Authors: Tags: Meds Pain Management Primary Care Source Type: blogs