The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued new guidance for clinicians on how and when to prescribe opioids for pain. Released Thursday, this revamps the agency's 2016 recommendations which some doctors and patients have criticized for promoting a culture of austerity around opioids.
CDC officials say that doctors, insurers, pharmacies and regulators sometimes misapplied the older guidelines, causing some patients significant harm, including "untreated and undertreated pain, serious withdrawal symptoms, worsening pain outcomes, psychological distress, overdose, and [suicide]," according to the updated guidance.
The 100-page document and its topline recommendation serve as a roadmap for prescribers who are navigating the thorny issue of treating pain, including advice on handling pain relief after surgery and managing chronic pain conditions, which are estimated to affect as many as one in every five people in the U.S.
The 2016 guidelines proved immensely influential in shaping policy — fueling a push by insurers, state medical boards, politicians and federal law enforcement to curb prescribing of opioids.
The fallout, doctors and researchers say, is hard to overstate: a crisis of untreated pain. Many patients with severe chronic pain saw their longstanding prescriptions rapidly reduced or cut off altogether, sometimes with dire consequences, like suicide or overdose as they turned to the tainted supply of illicit drugs.
I was just malding about how there was a capitalist conspiracy between the state, Perdue pharma, and the entire medical profession to sell magic heroin to people that murdered one million people over 20 years and it's treated as an oopsie instead of CRIMES OF CAPITALISM.
And then instead of, like, admitting what they'd done and taking any responsibility Doctors collectively decided that actually the poor sick people they had tormented and murdered were at fault, and the correct response was to inflict medical torture on a vast and unprecedented scale.
Like we're expected to believe that in 1999, after everyone on earth had known for hundreds of years that opium in general and heroin specifically were very addictive, a bunch of used car salesmen showed up in Drs offices and were like "Hey I've got magic heroin that doesn't cause addiction? What to buy a shitload of it and hand it out like candy? I'll give you a free vacation!" and that's... just... like something we should accept was an "Accident" or something on the part of doctors and not blatant, obvious corruption . And then when Perdue was finally "punished" they were given paltry fines and as far as I know not a single executive or shareholder has been shot for, again, murdering a million people.