there is the unintended effect of politicization of opioid use.
there needed to be a "correction" from the free wheeling "opioids never cause addiction" / "COT patients never suffer consequences of opioid use" mantra.
you can argue that it swung the other way too much. but to not acknowledge the issue would have been more problematic.
most importantly, it did not address the underlying issue - we use too many opioids for chronic noncancer pain.
we should be changing the norms regarding casual opioid use and we should not be starting them on chronic nonmalignant pain, except in situations that border on palliative
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interesting nugget - the WHO estimated that 115,000 people worldwide died of opioid overdose in 2017.
The term “opioids” includes compounds that are extracted from the poppy seed as well as semisynthetic and synthetic compounds that can interact with opioid receptors in the brain.
www.who.int
47,600 Americans died of opioid overdose in 2017.
there are 330 million americans and 7.9 billion people worldwide. we make up 4.4% of the worlds population.
yet we had 41% of the opioid overdose deaths.
(oh and for those who think "well, everyone else is dying from alcohol - the US ranks 50th out of 183 countries in alcohol related deaths. better than France, Germany, Russia but worse than UK, Ireland, Australia)