The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been in the news often, as the Covid-19 crisis has been in the forefront of national and global news. The CDC, according to Wikipedia, is a “United States federal agency”, and its “main goal is the protection of public health and safety through the control and prevention of disease, injury, and disability in the US and worldwide”, focusing on “national attention on developing and applying disease control and prevention”. The CDC recently rolled out new recommendations on the guidance of prescribing opioids in an effort to update its 2016 CDC Guideline for Prescribing Opioids, soliciting public comments through April 11, 2022.
The following article on the Fox News website titled CDC proposes new opioid guidelines focusing on alternatives to treating pain provides a review of CDC’s new recommendations on prescribing opioids. Here is an excerpt from the article:
“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is updating its guidelines for prescribing opioids for chronic pain, citing new research on alternative treatments to treat pain rather than recommending strict dose limits on prescription practices that were in the initial guidelines, according to the agency’s website. The current guidelines date to 2016.
In the 1990s there was a call by some pharmaceutical companies, insurers and pain specialists for better control of pain for common medical problems like back pain and arthritis, which was intertwined with a simultaneous aggressive marketing push for prescription drugs like OxyContin, according to a recent Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) report.
Journalist Beth Macy’s 2018 book ‘Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America’ showed how the pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma’s devious marketing of OxyContin directly contributed to patients getting addicted to the prescription pain meds, leading to the epidemic crisis in the U.S., according to Healthline.
The report noted the streaming platform Hulu adapted the book into a partially fictionalized limited series titled “Dopesick” which concentrated on the epidemic crisis through the perspective of the doctors and addicts as well as the pharmaceutical company who downplayed the addiction potential while aggressively up-marketing them.
In response to the worst opioid epidemic in U.S. history, the CDC issued the 2016 opioid prescribing guidelines to `… ensure that clinicians and patients consider safer and more effective treatment, improve patient outcomes such as reduced pain and improved function, and reduce the number of persons who develop opioid use disorder, overdose, or experience other adverse events related to these drugs’.”
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The new guidance appears to look for a fine balance between the pain meds prescriber and the welfare of the patients going through their pain treatment. It also aims for more flexibility as compared to the guidelines set on 2016. If it goes through, then there is a possibility that nontraditional treatments for pain relief may continue to become mainstream, and even be embraced and allowed coverage by medical insurance companies. It will be interested how this pans out and how it will positively affect patients going through pain treatments.
To Your Success & Freedom,
Glenn Shimabukuro
