Study Finds Doctors Had No Reason For Prescribing One-Third Of Opioid Prescription from Collective Evolution
In Brief
- The Facts:The opioid
crisis is at an all-time high in the United States. New research shows
that some doctors are part of the problem as they are prescribing
opioids for no reason.
- Reflect On:Should we be investing more research into non-addictive methods of pain control? Should there be a background check before opioid painkillers are prescribed? Is our health care system actually promoting good health? Why are these drugs legal?
The misuse and
addiction to opiates has become an epidemic in the United States. In
fact, every single day over 115 people die from overdosing on opioids.
Addiction to opioids, which includes heroin, prescription pain
medication and synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl, is an extremely
serious national crisis that affects public health and social and
economic welfare.
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Unfortunately, the majority of these
addictions are due in large part to the prescription of opioid pain
relievers whether the patient actually needed them or not and with no
background check of any kind to make sure the patient didn’t have a
history of drug abuse or addictive personality.
Recently, the team at Harvard Medical
School and the Rand Corp, released some shocking information after
checking medical records from 2006 to 2015. The records showed that a
physician gave no explanation at all for writing an opioid prescription
in 29 percent of the cases.
These findings help support the major
criticism from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the
Food and Drug Administration, claiming that inappropriate prescribing
practices have been in large part to blame for the opioid crises. In
2016 alone, 42,000 people in the United States have died from the use of
opioids.
The CDC has been pushing to have doctors
prescribe opioids only when absolutely necessary, prescribing the
lowest dose they can and ending the prescription as soon as possible.
What Did The Research Discover?
Professor of healthcare policy at
Harvard, Nicole Maestas, and her colleagues went through tens of
thousands of medical records looking at over 31,000 physician surveys
that included prescriptions for opioids. What they found was truly
alarming. Two-thirds of the records included a pain diagnosis, back
pain, arthritis, diabetes and other chronic conditions, five percent
were given for pain related to cancer.
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“No pain diagnoses was recorded at the remaining 28.5 percent,” the team wrote in their report, which was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
“At visits with no pain diagnoses
recorded, the most common diagnoses were hypertension, hyperlipidemia
(high cholesterol), opioid dependence and ‘other follow-up examination,”
they wrote.
Over the past 20 years the number of
opioid prescriptions has risen drastically, the CDC feels that people
would do better with other painkillers, and sometimes even just ice.
The researchers feel that at the very least doctors should have to write down a reason for prescribing someone an opioid
“Whatever the reasons, lack of robust
documentation undermines our efforts to understand physician prescribing
patterns and curtails our ability to stem overprescribing,” Dr.
Tisamarie Sherry, a researcher from the study said in a statement.
Profit Before People?
This study truly goes to show that
often, the ones who are prescribing our ‘medicine’ are thinking more
about potential profit than the health and well-being of their patients.
This is in no way trying to throw all doctors under the bus, but this
does bring a very important issue to the surface in order to be
addressed.
Clearly, there needs to be way more
regulations as to who is being prescribed opioids and who isn’t. Many of
those who are currently struggling with a heroin addiction in the
United States have gotten that far from what started with an accident,
or some kind of pain that led their doctors to prescribing them opioids
in the first place. These drugs are powerfully addictive and are
directly to blame for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who are
currently addicted to this substance.
What makes heroin illegal and opioids
legal in the eyes of the law? Is it because one is able to turn a profit
for the establishment and one is not?
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