| Opioid sales quadrupled between 1999 and 2014. > but what is different now that makes so many more people get hooked on them? The US VA noticed that pain was not being adequately treated. They created a campaign to make every HCP ask patients about pain. They looked at the science of the time which seemed to be saying that opioids were not addictive if you use them to treat pain. (they're less addictive if used short term for short term pain (post surgery, for example) but more addictive if used long term.) Drug companies put out new formulations that they claimed were less addictive - turns out they were more addictive. US doctors prescribe huge amounts of opioids. The tragedy is that pain is still left untreated. The VA campaign meant people got opioids (cheap, but not particularly effective for long term pain) but didn't get access to pain management clinics. https://www.va.gov/PAINMANAGEMENT/docs/Pain_As_the_5th_Vital... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1924634/ > Routinely measuring pain by the 5th vital sign did not increase the quality of pain management. Patients with substantial pain documented by the 5th vital sign often had inadequate pain management. https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/prescribing.html > Sales of prescription opioids in the U.S. nearly quadrupled from 1999 to 2014,1 but there has not been an overall change in the amount of pain Americans report.2,3 During this time period, prescription opioid overdose deaths increased similarly. |
That, there, is the "money" quote. You've been criticized elsewhere in the thread for the assertion that opiates "don't work" for long-term pain, but that strikes me as a very reasonable summary in the face of this kind of evidence.
Sure, there may be exceptions, but they must be quite rare for the above to remain true. (Some of them may not even be true exceptions, if "intermittent" use for long-term pain actually looks the same as repeated use for short-term pain).