Guardian: The US could see loosened guidance around prescribing opioids, as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) considers relaxing some of its guidelines in a move that could signal a new direction for managing chronic pain.
The CDC last Thursday released proposed changes to its guidance on prescribing opioids, rolling back limits on which doses can be prescribed and for how many days in cases of acute pain.
The agency created rules in 2016 to reduce prescriptions that were fueling the opioid overdose epidemic. But as rules like these were put in place, opioid overdose deaths rose instead of falling.
New laws in several states were drafted to codify the restrictions, and some insurers began basing their coverage of medications on the guidance.
The sweeping actions cut off medications for some patients battling chronic pain and substance disorders, sometimes without the option of tapering down the medications or undergoing substance dependence treatment.
As the sources of medications dried up, some patients turned to illicit substances like heroin and fentanyl.
“You’re inadvertently driving people to an illicit supply if they’re being cut off,” said Kate Nicholson, executive director of the National Pain Advocacy Center. “The street supply is so tainted that you’re really pushing people to a very dangerous thing.”
Fatal overdoses rose from 63,000 in 2016 to more than 100,000 last year, many of them driven by the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl. Read more…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/15/us-could-loosen-opioids-guidelines-cdc
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For the elderly in chronic pain, the CDC are mafia crime agents… The government needs to get out of the way of doctors and their patient’s needs… These brainiacs on the govermment payrolls should be hobbled with pain and withheld pain medications… We would soon see a return to sanity within the medical business that lets the doctor patient relationship establish the need for mitigating pain dosages that helps the quality of daily life that chronic pain keeps patients from living to a fuller degree.
I can tell you just how disqusting and rhetorical it is to listen to your doctor be controlled by the medical Insurance industry and the CDC, and corporate fascist medical. I just had a surgery to relieve my Spinal stenosis, but while the Covid-19 insanity was underway, I could not get elective surgery to alleviate my pain in the 3 to 9 zone every day… I had to beg for pain medications at 73 years of age with no useful relief on the dose I was on. 1, 5mg tab every six ours…it should have been 3, 5mg tabs every 4 hours… So, what if you have to go through withdraws at the end of your pain cycle once you get repaired. The outcome is just the same… You have to do the time in withdraws no matter what dosage you take…
For me, the corporate gathering of doctors because of the insurance’s malpractice debacle has set back medicine and the doctor patient relationship to a slave mode of existence… Nuff Said A-G “Corporate Profit over real health care”…
Real healthcare is not turning your body into a junk depository. My late father was a surgeon and I grew up around hospitals thankfully because I’m an athlete with very advanced lumbar stenosis like a 95 year old but I don’t use drugs at all instead I relieve the pain with only exercise. I use the teeter gravity boots everyday or if you can’t use them use an inversion table. I know it’s easier and less work to pop the pills but I’ve been around teams and kids and I’ve seen zombies going through life with major problems just because the oversight wasn’t there.
And I know how drug companies push their stuff faster than any product in the market.
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