Policymakers Obsess Over Pain Prescribing and Ignore the Giant Elephant in the Room: Prohibition

Jeffrey A. SingerOn January 20th, theCincinnati Enquirer ran a story on the recentreport from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that showed a 30.1 percent drop in prescription opioid volume from 2010  – 2011 to 2016 – 2017. While the CDC report was non‐​judgmental, it was greeted by hospital administrators and emergency physicians in the Cincinnati area as good news.The article quotes one physician/ ​hospital spokesperson as saying:“The patient can know, ‘My encounter with the ED will … lead to a good outcome. I will not be exposed to unnecessary threats … downstream.’“They will treat the pain in a safe way. ”I was interviewed for the story and shared with the reporter my experiences as a general surgeon seeing patients referred from emergency departments in excruciating pain who were given minimal pain medication  — sometimes justTylenol(acetaminophen) or ibuprofen  — for conditions needing urgent surgical intervention. I told reporter Terry DeMio “It means a lot of people are getting under ‐​treated for pain.”Policymakers, including those in hospital and health care administration, refuse to accept the federal government data showingno correlation between prescription volume and the non ‐​medical use of opioids or opioid use disorder among persons aged 12 and over. Theyignore the 2018study of more than 568,000 “opioid‐​naïve” acute pain patients given opioid...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs