Kudos for drug take-back success
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Editor,
On Oct. 29, Prescription Drug Take-Back Day, 17 pounds of prescription drugs were turned in at the Community Center in Mission and Pablo Law and Order. Bravo, people.
The U.S. Center for Disease Control has demonstrated a relationship between increased opioid overdose death rates, increased addiction rates and increased opioid prescribing. Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing.Org, with links to excellent YouTube presentations, believes that "well-meaning physicians have been misled to believe that compassionate care for a person with chronic pain automatically equals an opioid prescription." Dr. Michael Van Korff of Washington's Group Health Research Institute writes that "Summary classifications like DSM-IV do not adequately convey the character, range and extent of opioid-related problems among chronic opioid therapy patients," and in a personal communication to me, "Prescribing opioids is never low-risk at any dosage level."
An editorial, "Opioids for Chronic Pain," in the Archives of Internal Medicine from Sept 12, 2011, documents: "Of the 25 recommendations included in the Opioid Treatment Guidelines of the American Pain Society and the American Academy of Pain Medicine, none is supported by high-quality evidence. In contrast, the harms associated with opioid therapy, especially high dose therapy, are clear. We believe that the trend during the past decade to prescribe more opioids for more patients with chronic pain should be reversed. We should not continue to prescribe high-dose opioids with little evidence of long term benefit and clear evidence of substantial harm." In the CDC’s "Vital Signs" from November 2011, an article titled "Prescription Painkiller Overdoses in the U.S.” describes what we (U.S. government, states, individuals, and healthcare providers) all can do.
For what individuals here did Oct. 29 and are doing and will do: bravo, people.
Ken Cairns, MD
Polson
