Part 5 - Why Do We Lump the Non-Cancer Pain Syndromes Together?

by Drew Rosielle (@drosielle)A Series of Observations on Opioids By a Palliative Doc Who Prescribes A Lot of Opioids But Also Has Questions.This is the 5th post in a series about opioids, with a focus on how my thinking about opioids has changed over the years. See also:Part 1 – Introduction, General Disclaimers, Hand-Wringing, and a Hand-Crafted Graph.Part 2 – We Were Wrong 20 years Ago, Our Current Response to the Opioid Crisis is Wrong, But We Should Still Be Helping Most of our Long-Term Patients Reduce Their Opioid DosesPart 3 – Opioids Have Ceiling Effects, High-Doses are Rarely Therapeutic, and Another Hand-Crafted GraphPart 4 – Everything We Were Taught About High Doses Was Wrong, And The Same Hand-Crafted GraphThis is Part 5 – Why Do We Lump The Non-Cancer Pain Syndromes Together?Part 6 is heavily related to Part 5, and will ask the sort of inverse to Part 5 –Why Is Cancer Pain So Special?The language we use to categorize pain and talk about pain is inadequate, dangerous, and unfair.In particular what I mean here are the distinctions made between ‘chronic pain’ and ‘cancer pain.’What is actually meant by chronic pain? In the very important CDC opioid guidelines, they use this definition: “Chronic pain has been variably defined but is defined within this guideline as pain that typically lasts at least 3 months or past the time of normal tissue healing.” Most definitions use something like that. Note that the definition really focuses on the tem...
Source: Pallimed: A Hospice and Palliative Medicine Blog - Category: Palliative Care Tags: opioid pain rosielle The profession Source Type: blogs