| Podcast
Management of acute pain following surgery or trauma requiring opioid treatment can be particularly challenging in patients with substance use disorders. This session will explore ways to optimize analgesic care, keep patients safe, and promote behavioral consequences that are just and equitable in...
| Podcast
Opioid emergencies have risen with the increase in prescribing of opioids. It is imperative that prescribers of opioids know when to coprescribe naloxone therapy to their patients. It goes beyond the patient suspected of misuse and abuse. This presentation will focus on the patients you might not...
| Article
Certainly the idea of making an opioid safer is very desirable, and the current approach has been to address certain components of the way that these drugs are abused. Most of the products we have currently are focused at abuse through nasal snorting or through injection. We have technologies that...
| Article
There is a special report from the online journal STAT that reviews the dimensions of the crisis in opioid prescribing for patients with chronic pain. While not breaking new ground in the discussion, the report offers a succinct roundup of the different points of view on this issue of central...
| Article
A study conducted at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has advanced our understanding of the mechanisms underlying oxycodone action that may be of value in the effort to separate the analgesic effects of opioids from their addictive properties. The protein RGS9-2 is known to control the...
| Article
A research team from Indiana University, Bloomington has concluded that the presence of a variety of pre-existing behavioral and psychiatric conditions may be predictors of long-term opioid use, and further, that patients presenting with these conditions may be more likely to receive opioid...
| Article
About 10 years ago I wrote a paper with Ken Kirsh and Howard Heit about how every stakeholder from the clinician to the patient, to the media, to law enforcement, regulators, could all work together to improve the state of affairs in pain management and the fate of people with pain. It was Ken Kirsh...
| Article
Methadone is an outstanding analgesic. It has a long half-life which can be very tricky of course, but it gives the patient the flexibility of only having to take their analgesic twice a day. It also has multiple mechanisms of action over and above the other opioids. It’s a mu receptor agonist but...
| Article
The existence of opioid induced hyperalgesia has been debated, but I believe that it does. It’s when a patient uses an opioid and over time develops not just tolerance but super tolerance. Tolerance is normal. You take a medicine, your body adjusts to that dose. The side effects will usually go away...
| Article
When we think about the reward circuits in the brain, heavily dependent on dopamine and now more evidence to suggest the involvement of endogenous opioids, you can begin to recognize that from an evolutionary standpoint, we really do need those circuits. We need to be motivated to seek out things...