Pain Management: No Encumbrance In Health Care

Opioid addiction is so prevalent in the healthcare system because of the countless number of hospital patients being treated for chronic pain. While opioid analgesics have beneficial painkilling properties, they also yield detrimental dependence and addiction. There is a legitimate need for the health care system to provide powerful medications because prolonged pain limits activities of daily living, work productivity, quality of life, etc. (Taylor, 2015). Patients need to receive appropriate pain treatment, however, opioids need to be prescribed after careful consideration of the benefits and risks.

First of all the author provides a well know resource The World Health Organization. This Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations who has been around for many years. It’s a well reliable facility which provides estimates of patients who obtain pain medication for chronic pain. The author also states that the drug is a stimulant that relieves severe pain and produces a highly addictive powerful feeling of well – being. (Berrettini, 2016)

Mike Alstott knows first-hand how opioids, when used correctly, can play an important role in managing pain and helping people to function, but he is also keenly aware of the growing crisis of opioid misuse and overdose. More American adults are dying from misusing prescription narcotics than ever before. An estimated 35 people die every day in the U.S. from accidental prescription painkiller overdoses resulting from things like not taking a medication as directed or not understanding how multiple

Considerable cautions have been obtained throughout the United States to decrease the misuse of prescription opioids and helps to minimize opioid overdoses and related complications. Even though the pain medications have a significant part in the treatment of acute and chronic pain situations, it sometimes happen that the high dose prescription or the prescribed medications, without having enough monitoring, can create bad outcomes. It is always a dilemma for the providers to find who is really in need of pain medications and to identify those who are questionably misusing opioids.

Addressing the people exposed to opioids may reduce the number of people starting and continuing to abuse drugs in the long term. In addition to this suggestion, data found from 2006-2015, the duration of opioids increased by a third suggesting fewer patients choose to start using opioids for pain management, however, patients already on medication continue to do so. This is because once long term opioid users, even when taking their medication as directed by their doctor, eventually develop a tolerance to the drug. A tolerance to pain medication can cause patients to up their dose or take too many medications in a small time frame in order to alleviate the same amount of pain that a smaller dose would have fixed in the past. The risk of developing tolerance is an important conversation to have with a health care professional because in addiction to pain, patients go on to develop a physical dependence to the drug. Physically patients feel pain, illness, and other symptoms; in some cases they are unable to give up the drug. This is when their dependence is classified as an

Vivek Murthy, a U.S. Surgeon General, said he wanted to change the way Doctors have been taught to handle pain management for the last twenty to thirty years (824). The reason Murthy wants to do this is because while he was reading a training document for nurses and doctors it claimed , "If your patient is concerned that they may develop dependence on opioids, you can safely reassure them that addiction to opioids is very rare in patients who have pain" (823). This document also reassured doctors they could prescribe opioids as a long-term treatment. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention advises doctors that pain-relieving effects may wear off for long-term users(824). This explains how opioids can be used to deal with pain management, but if used as a long-term treatment it can create an

The use of opioid-based prescription medications to treat non-terminal chronic pain can cause side effects from short term use, and is overly common and ineffective. Firstly, opioid usage can induce negative short-term effects. According to William A. Darity, Jr., short-term opioid usage causes negative effects such as “euphoria, drowsiness, and impaired motor and cognitive functioning” (“Drugs”). The short term effects of the opioids may cause the patient to isolate him or herself socially due to being self-conscious about his or her friends and peers seeing the individual in their current condition. Due to his or her fragile emotional state, however, if the patient isolates him or herself during a time in which he or she should have increased

Although addiction and overdose of opioids was not declared an epidemic by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) until 2011, the beginning of the epidemic can be traced back as early as the 1980’s when attention in medical care began to turn toward pain management. By the early 2000’s the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations named pain “the fifth vital sign,” implying that pain is as important clinically as pulse rate, temperature, respiration rate, and blood pressure (Wilson, 2016). At the same time, there has been an emphasis change from patient wellness to patient satisfaction metrics. Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as Advil, Aleve, or aspirin have raised safety their own safety concerns, contributing to increased use of opioids. The lack of patient access to and insurance coverage for chronic pain management specialists or alternative healing therapies also contributes to the opioid epidemic (Hawk,

Opioids, otherwise known as prescription pain medication, are used to treat acute and chronic pain. They are the most powerful pain relievers known. When taken as directed they can be safe and effective at managing pain, however, opioids can be highly addictive. Ease of access helps people get pain medications through their physician or by having friends and family get the medication for them. With their ease of access and being highly addictive the use and misuse of opioids have become a growing epidemic. Patients should be well educated on the affects opioid use can have. More importantly instead of the use of opioids, physicians should look into alternative solutions for pain management. While pain medication is helpful with chronic pain, it is also highly addictive, doctors should be more stringent to whom and how often they prescribe pain medication.

Patients would regularly take their prescribed opioid medications in order to relieve the symptoms of their pain. In

Mandated limits on opioid prescriptions for acute pain offers the promise of advancing the safe use of these medications in two ways. First, it will reduce the exposure of first time users to these addictive substances following episodes of acute pain. For some patients who come to misuse opioids, the euphoria or sedating effects of these medications are initially experienced in the context of routine medical care. There are countless anecdotes of patients who take opioids for a minor orthopedic injury or some other acute pain condition and then go on to use prescription opioids non-medically. A recent population-based study suggested that 6% of incident opioid users progress to long-term use.4 Another study found that patients who received opioids following minor surgery were 44% more likely to become long-term opioid users compared to those who did not.5 Decreasing the initial amount dispensed may potentially lessen the risk that patients develop an affinity for these drugs and transition to chronic use or misuse.

Painkillers are the most common treatment option for chronic pain. However, the painkillers that are usually prescribed to patients are opioids. One of the major side effects of opioids is addiction. Canada is currently suffering from an opioid crisis because doctors didn’t fully appreciate or know the addictive properties of prescription opioids.

The issue of pain management has been an ongoing crisis for ages. The need for solutions and methods of avoiding pain is natural, however, as time has passed, misuse of these solutions has gotten out of hand. The abuse of prescription opioids, in particular, must be acknowledged. By prescribing opioids to patients, doctors are inadvertently creating drug addicts and fueling the heroin epidemic. As patients grow tolerant to opioids, they are forced to search for stronger drugs, commit crimes, and ultimately die. Alternate solutions for pain management and regulation of opiates must be implemented in order to prevent the meaningless loss of lives.

‘Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage’ (International association for the study of pain 2014). Pain can be made up of complex and subjective experiences. The experience of pain is highly personal and private, and can not be directly observed or measured from one person to the next (Mac Lellan 2006). According to the agency for health care policy and research 1992, an individuals self-report of pain is the most reliable indicator of its presence. This is also supported by Mc Caffery’s definition in 1972, when he said ‘Pain is whatever the experiencing patient says it is, existing whenever he says it does’.

The International Association for the Study of Pain defines pain as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage” (1979). Pain is actually the culprit behind warranting a visit to a physician office for many people (Besson, 1999). Notoriously unpleasant, pain could also pose a threat as both a psychological and economic burden (Phillips, 2006). Sometimes pain does happen without any damage of tissue or any likely diseased state. The reasons for such pain are poorly understood and the term used to describe such type of pain is “psychogenic pain”. Also, the loss of productivity and daily activity due to pain is also significant. Pain engulfs a trillion dollars of GDP for lost work time and disability payments (Melnikova, 2010). Untreated pain not only impacts a person suffering from pain but also impacts their whole family. A person’s quality of life is negatively impacted by pain and it diminishes their ability to concentrate, work, exercise, socialize, perform daily routines, and sleep. All of these negative impacts ultimately lead to much more severe behavioral effects such as depression, aggression, mood alterations, isolation, and loss of self-esteem, which pose a great threat to human society.