It is the Editors of the New York Times that have often been ignorant when it comes to drug policy and pain treatment. The below paragraph from “Painkiller Abuses and Ignorance“ is but another example:
“The researchers found little or no evidence that long-term opioid therapy (therapy lasting more than three months) relieves chronic pain, in part because almost all the studies are of short duration. It is extremely reckless to allow opioid usage and deaths to soar in the absence of proof that the treatment is effective. By contrast, there is considerable evidence of opioid therapy’s dangers, including overdoses, opioid abuse, fractures, heart attacks and sexual dysfunction.”
In other words, because there has been no research performed on long term consequences of opioid prescription, the editors would have people deprived of their efefective pain medication.
What they should be advocating is research to determine if indeed the benefits of long term treatment outweigh the dangers.
One of the causes of chronic pain is the failure to sufficiently medicate patients at the time of the trauma. Because human metabolisms varies so much, one patient might require twice as much opioid as another.
Physicians feel at risk to write prescriptions for sufficient pain killer, although larger amounts only reflect patient metabolism and are of little danger.
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