Pain and Addiction: The Distribution of Supply and Demand During the Opioid Epidemic

Am J Phys Med Rehabil. 2021 Oct 20. doi: 10.1097/PHM.0000000000001914. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTA considerable portion of the opioid epidemic has been driven by physician-prescribed opioids for pain management. Thus, policies to address the epidemic must consider not only the resources available to manage addiction, but those to manage acute and chronic pain as well. For the period 2017 - 2019, we sought to describe the distribution, by state, of indicators of the supply of resources to address pain and addiction (graduate medical education subspecialty training in pain and addiction; number of board-certified pain and addiction specialists, number of opioid treatment centers), as well as indicators of the demands for those services (opioid prescriptions, opioid overdose deaths), to identify states that appear to suffer from a mismatch between supply and demand. We also sought to examine the relationships between these treatment resources and indicators of the magnitude of the opioid epidemic, through an exploratory correlational analysis. The resulting model may inform public policy by suggesting areas in need of greater GME training and more pain and addiction specialists, and by suggesting hypotheses about the impact of these specialists on outcome that are worthy of further study.PMID:34686634 | DOI:10.1097/PHM.0000000000001914
Source: Pain Physician - Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Source Type: research