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: Jeffrey A. Singer Source Type: blogs
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