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Although up to 60% of patients with opioid use disorder (OUD) also have chronic pain, the conditions have been mostly studied separately. A $4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s Helping End Addiction Long-term Initiative to the Wake Forest University School of Medicine hopes to...
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The question posed in an article published in Annals of Internal Medicine: have patients suffering from chronic noncancer pain been affected negatively by state laws curbing opioid prescribing? There have been a few overlapping laws, for prescribing caps, pill mills, enrollment, and mandatory...
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New guidelines for perioperative acute pain treatment in patients undergoing complex surgeries have been established by the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) and 14 other societies, including American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery...
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The journal of Anesthesiology featured a special article in which a new concept is presented: a prescription opioid ecosystem. The need for this ecosystem stems from the “opioid paradox” that, even though the past 10 years has seen a drop in opioid prescribing of about 38%, deaths from opioids have...
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The journal of Pediatrics reports a study of the transition from medical use of opioids in children to nonmedical use later in life. What does early exposure lead to? Reviewers searched almost a dozen databases for patients under age 18 who underwent a short or unknown course of opioids, who later...
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With fatal overdoses at an all time high and opioids responsible for over 70% of them, naloxone is greatly needed. But over half of overdoses happen when the user is alone; 27% occur in front of bystanders who don’t realize what is happening or don’t know what to do. Therefore, news of a wearable...
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JAMA reports a noted increase in opioid use disorder treatments in those enrolled in Medicaid. The study looked at over a million enrollees from 11 states: medication treatment prevalence in 2014 was 47.8% and in 2018, 57.1%. Of note, use of OUD medication was higher in pregnant women and white...
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How much of a problem is doctor shopping? “Doctor shopping” is defined as ≥1 day of getting overlapping prescriptions for opioids from ≥2 prescribers and going to ≥3 pharmacies to have them filled. A recent article published in the Journal of Pain Research looked at patients with chronic noncancer...
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The Non-Opioids Prevent Addiction in the Nation (NOPAIN) Act was recently introduced into the House of Representatives, after working its way through the senate. Its goal? To make it easier to access non-opioid pain management treatments. The Act hopes to “address payment disincentives for...
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Challenges. That’s what prescribers are facing when prescribing buprenorphine. They face barriers, hurdles, difficulties helping their patients overcome opioid use disorder. Even though things are changing—the federal government has removed some barriers, such as requiring special training for...