Treating Chronic Pain is Key to Solving the Opioid Epidemic
Now that we know that the pharmaceutical companies are being punished for their role in the opioid crisis, we can all relax and know that things are going to be ok, right? Not so fast. We know that the pharmaceutical industry behaved like selfish monsters pushing pills on doctors, pharmacists, and patients creating a deadly national health crisis. State legislatures respond with new laws restricting access to the drugs in the hopes of stemming the large number of deaths. The medical community is retraining doctors and staff regarding the prescribing of opiates. But these are only first steps in addressing the opiate crisis. Just as trying to put out a forest fire with a simple bucket of water provides only temporary relief, reducing the number of opiates prescribed only begins to address the crisis. There would not have been a market for the pills if there wasn’t a large contingent of patients with chronic pain. A Center for Disease Control study in 2016 found “an estimated 20.4% of U.S. adults had chronic pain and 8.0% of U.S. adults had high-impact chronic pain.” That is over 50 million Americans experiencing chronic pain with 4 million in high impact chronic pain. Why are we not looking more closely at other methods for managing chronic pain? As long as there are people in chronic pain, we will have people who are understandably looking for a way to escape the pain. Providing alternative methods and funding for more research into dealing with chronic pain would address one of the root causes of the opiate crisis.
Simply limiting the availability of opiates does not help those in pain. When patients seek medical treatment for their pain, doctors prescribe all types of drugs and treatments beginning with the least potent and then moving up the scale to opiates until the pain is alleviated. However, for chronic pain patients, the pain does not subside. If they are taking opiates, they need a larger and larger dose to get the pain level to decrease leading to addiction and for many, abuse.
While we do not know exactly how the pain signals work in the brain, theories of chronic pain indicate that the brain signal for pain is in a permanent “on” position. Chronic pain affects patients’ mental health leading to severe depression around the normal life they have lost and anxiety about the return of…
