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Friday, November 4, 2022

CDC Loosens Guidelines for Doctors Prescribing Opioids

“Socalj” for Borderland Beat

The nation’s top public health agency on Thursday softened its guidelines for U.S. doctors prescribing oxycodone and other opioid painkillers.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's new recommendations are an update to 2016 guidelines that added momentum to a decline in opioid painkiller prescriptions.

The previous guidance succeeded in reducing inappropriate and dangerous prescribing, some experts say. But they also were seen as a barrier to care, with some pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions as doctors wrote them. The new guidelines are designed to ensure that patients get compassionate and safe pain care, CDC officials said.

“Patients with pain should receive compassionate, safe, and effective pain care. We want clinicians and patients to have the information they need to weigh the benefits of different approaches to pain care, with the goal of helping people reduce their pain and improve their quality of life,” said Christopher M. Jones, PharmD, DrPH, MPH, Acting Director of CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.

The 2022 Clinical Practice Guideline addresses the following areas:
  1. Determining whether to initiate opioids for pain
  2. Selecting opioids and determining opioid dosages
  3. Deciding duration of initial opioid prescription and conducting follow-up
  4. Assessing risk and addressing potential harms of opioid use
The Clinical Practice Guideline supports the primary prevention pillar of the HHS Overdose Prevention Strategy – supporting the development and promotion of evidence-based treatments to effectively manage pain.

The guideline is a clinical tool to improve communication between clinicians and patients and empower them to make informed decisions about safe and effective pain care. The recommendations are voluntary and provide flexibility to clinicians and patients to support individualized, patient-centered care. They should not be used as an inflexible, one-size-fits-all policy or law or applied as a rigid standard of care or to replace clinical judgement about personalized treatment.
A draft released in February received 5,500 public comments. Some modifications were made, but several main changes stayed in place, including:

  • The CDC no longer suggests trying to limit opioid treatment for acute pain to three days.
  • The agency is dropping the specific recommendation that doctors avoid increasing dosage to a level equivalent to 90 milligrams of morphine per day.
  • For patients receiving higher doses of opioids, the CDC is urging doctors to not abruptly halt treatment unless there are indications of a life-threatening danger. The agency offers suggestions on tapering patients off the drugs.
Opioids painkillers can be addictive — even when used under doctors’ orders — and were identified as a big reason for a rise in U.S. drug overdoses that began more than two decades ago. Other drugs have overtaken them in overdose statistics, and illicit fentanyl is now the biggest driver of deaths.

CDC Also States “Drug Overdose Deaths Remain High”

More than 932,000 people have died since 1999 from a drug overdose.1 In 2020, 91,799 drug overdose deaths occurred in the United States. The age-adjusted rate of overdose deaths increased by 31% from 2019 (21.6 per 100,000) to 2020 (28.3 per 100,000).

Opioids—mainly synthetic opioids (other than methadone)—are currently the main driver of drug overdose deaths. 82.3% of opioid-involved overdose deaths involved synthetic opioids.

Opioids were involved in 68,630 overdose deaths in 2020 (74.8% of all drug overdose deaths).

Drug overdose deaths involving psychostimulants such as methamphetamine are increasing with and without synthetic opioid involvement.

From 1999 to 2020, more than 263,000 people died in the United States from overdoses involving prescription opioids. Overdose deaths involving prescription opioids nearly increased by five times from 1999 to 2020.

Source CDC, ABC News, CDC

38 comments:

  1. Replacing illegal drugs (fent) with legal drugs (Oxy and stuff) = fighting fire with fire.

    Press, DEA or whoever: "There are less people dying from fentanyl. The war on drugs works!"

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    Replies
    1. Fent is actually a legal drug that is used medically but is illegally abused.

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    2. Bro what are you doing

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    3. 1. You’re still not gonna have access to these pills
      2. The fatality risk for legal oxycodone with measured out dosages and quality control is in a completely other realm than fatality risk for unregulated fentanyl

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    4. Thankls for noting that 9:02. If you have surgery, you are given Fentanyl. Fentanyl is frequently used in end-of-life care with Hospice when pain becomes excruciating etc. Usually administered via IV or also a patch which is put on and replaced on average every 3 days.

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    5. 10:32 That's sounds more like a dumbass reply to a comment than an actual comment.

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    6. 11:33 All of that was kind of already obvious but ok

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    7. 6:40 Tell that to 10:32.

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  2. Nice, time to hit my Drs office. My back hurts. 🤣

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    Replies
    1. Your butt hurts to after meeting Sir.

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    2. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  3. I have a pic of mini pic recent November 2022

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  4. Damn it crazy how the pharmaceutical planned all this out with the drug cartels to make more money from prescribing pills to people. They had a secret meeting behind closed door let the cartels make there few millions from fentanyl for a few years than pharmaceutical comes back for the real killing and make even more money off the pills they prescribed to people. Crazy world the cartels ain’t the problem in the U.S it’s the Pharmaceutical Companies in the U.S that’s are the real dope makers.

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    Replies
    1. 9:05 I think you just overdosed on stupidity

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    2. What’s the point in making comments this stupid? It’s a total waste of time

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    3. The pills are gonna still be extremely hard to get… even for real pain patients.

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    4. 9:05 european companies too!

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    5. 9:05... fentanyl is a pain control medication that has been in use since the 1960s. If you have ever had a surgery you have been given Fentanyl whether or not you were alert at the time or not. It's used commonly in Hospice for the severe pain that frequently coincides with cancer and painful end of life care. It is most often used as a patch that is replaced every 3 days on the skin or if inpatient given through IV. It is a legal medication that has been diverted illegally.

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    6. 11:38 Lol no need to overcorrect Ms. H. Is fentanyl commonly used in surgery? Yes. But in all or even most surgeries? No. It’s not even a dissociative anesthetic thus rendering the notion that it’s the “universal surgery drug” as being sort of a nonsensical ideal.

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    7. I only mentioned it because somebody said that fentanyl was an illegal drug implying that there were no medical uses

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    8. Ms. H, I actually like it when someone puts out knowledge, there's no such thing as "overcorrect" in my book considering the USA is lagging behind in certain intellectual sectors and the vast majority of Americans lack scientific literacy.

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    9. 11:47 You clearly don’t understand the notion of overcorrection at all. The point is that they are not technically correct.. Saying for instance that if you’ve had surgery you’ve definitely or even probably had fentanyl is ridiculous. It’s use in surgeries is not that widespread. It’s widespread, but not that much. This isn’t that complicated and frankly this leads me to believe that you’ve never seen a good example of an overcorrection before if you think they “don’t exist”. Another ridiculous statement.

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    10. 1:33 How often it is actually used after surgery I don't know that's why I said nothing about that. I agree with Ms. H that it's a legal medical drug no matter how many times it is repeated.

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    11. 5:36 It’s fairly common to use it during surgery actually, not simply afterwards which is what Ms. H was talking about but at the end of the day most surgeries do not use fentanyl because it’s not really necessary nor practical to use an opioid for surgery. And I’m surprised that it’s even used as much as it is in surgery since it would be more useful for post-surgery pain, not actually going under. For surgeries what you want to use are dissociative anesthetics like ketamine. I can’t imagine that the abnormal degree to which fentanyl causes respiratory depression makes it that optimal for putting someone under. You shouldn’t really need anything beyond dissociative anesthetics for that and I find it strange how fentanyl doesn’t interact badly with dissociative anesthetics more often considering it’s highly highly dangerous to mix opioids with basically any “downer”, which many dissociative anesthetics are. I know it’s in a controlled hospital setting but still.

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  5. Lets blame Mexico, thats easier.

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  6. We need to get the politicians out of medicine. Your healthcare is strictly between you and your doctor. They need to remove all of these restrictions and prosecute doctors who abuse prescribing opoids.
    This was the very essence of Roe v Wade. Even though the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe, society must accept the very fundamental importance of the doctor-patient privilege.

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    Replies
    1. How is it strictly between me and my doctor when I can get plenty of over-the-counter medicines at the drugstore? The same should be true for at least mild opioids as well.

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    2. Without Politrickos, columbia healthncare owned by "senator" rick scott, ever would have been able to defraud medicare of more than 2 billion dollars they had to return to the US government, the Red Mafiya did the same in New Jersey after rudi giulianni toppled the Italian Mafiosos that had donal' trump by the ying-yangs and US senators and congressmen would not have been bought and paid by Big Pharma to approve opioids so they c oh uld defraud americans, medicare and every insurance company...
      Forbid Lobbying, profiteering and traffick of Influences for politrickos, supreme court judges, MAPACHES, coons, Uncle Toms and their wives and lovers under penalty of death.

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    3. 6:42 Yep. Someone can be a full-fledged DPH addict without their doctor even knowing.

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  7. This is a big blow to the youth

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    1. Shut…the fuck.. You know what, I’m not even gonna waste my energy.

      you’re an idiot

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    2. 10:45 and probably their last blow, you are a winner

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    3. 10:45 most pathetic trolling attempt I’ve seen in a while. If this isn’t joking/trolling don’t breed.

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  8. Replies
    1. Like your comment? Tell me about it 😆

      Must be exhausting being this stupid all the time.

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    2. Sad that pain patients are finally getting compassionate treatment? Dude you sound like a fucking monster

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  9. These drs are still gonna be scared to give you shit. I had my ankle broke and given a new titanium one. Other than what they gave me right after surgery, they gave me flexiril to take home.

    ReplyDelete

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