C.D.C. Painkiller Guidelines Aim to Reduce Addiction Risk
Yes the CDC Guidelines are out in the States. Aiming to reduce addiction by reducing prescriptions. Unfortunate for those who have a pain problem.
In an effort to curb what many consider the worst public health drug crisis in decades, the federal government on Tuesday published the first national standards for prescription painkillers, recommending that doctors try pain relievers like ibuprofen before prescribing the highly addictive pills, and that they give most patients only a few days’ supply.
Because pain patients have not already tried every OTC med they could to try and help with it before they went to the doctor already. Damn. Like ibuprofen will do anything. Not to mention the adverse effects of NSAIDs… that kill more people every year than painkillers do.
In the end, the agency softened the recommendations slightly but basically held its ground, a testament to how alarmed policy makers have become over the mounting overdoses and deaths from opioid addiction. Opioid deaths — including from heroin, which some people turn to after starting with prescription painkillers — reached a record 28,647 in 2014, according to the most recent federal statistics.
What about Just the deaths from chronic pain patients. Then when you take all that away. Measure how much the suicide rates in that group goes up. Untreated pain is a killer that is apparently ignored by people not managing their pain.
““The urgency of the epidemic, its devastating consequences, demands interventions that, in some instances, may make it harder for some patients to get their medication,” said Dr. Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse. “We need to set up a system to make sure they are covered. But we cannot continue the prescription practice of opioids the way we have been. We just can’t.”
I know what untreated pain is like. I know that it is dangerous. It is frightening it has come to this in the States. Fighting addiction and punishing chronic pain. Seeing addiction as dependence. Foolish nonsense but harmful. Now the stigma of the pain patient as a drug seeker and drug addict is going to be pervasive because the media has lumped them all together.
See more on chronic pain
Chronic pain: Don’t steal lives, doc
Chronic pain widespread in Canada
Check out my humour chronic pain book!
