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by Gatsky 3162 days ago
I think the benefits of oxycontin for acute pain are highly contentious.

For advanced cancer pain, oxycontin is effective and the rates of addiction are very low. Patients can't wait to get off it usually if the pain improves. There are likely to be many physiological and psychological factors explaining these differences.

1 comments

I'd really like to see some citations for your statement that patients with advanced cancer pain "can't wait to get off" of their opiods "if the pain improves."

"Advanced cancer pain" and "pain improves" [to a level where withdrawal seems like a good idea] seem like things that rarely go together. I could see people getting off of oxycontin to go onto stronger painkillers in hospice, but that feels like a very different thing to me.

Advanced cancer is treatable of course! The median survival for some types of advanced breast cancer is 7 years from diagnosis. Those patients may present with pain, start treatment, and get better. Happens all the time.

As for a citation, well nobody has done a study on that specific point, I'm talking from my experience of 500 or so patients.