How New Guidelines Can Positively Affect Your Practice
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently released new guidelines for primary care physicians on appropriate opiate management. These guidelines suggest that once the prescription of opioids hits 50 milligrams a day of morphine-equivalents—when incidents of death and other significant morbidity increases—the primary care doctor should get a consultation from a pain physician or discontinue the opiates.1
Dr. Peter Staats, an interventional pain management physician, views the new CDC guidelines as a positive. For doctors, they are an attempt to get back to the basics. Once a diagnosis is made, interventional therapies and treatment strategies are both considered, as opposed to just interventional strategies, with the goal of limiting the number of opioids or stopping them completely. In Dr. Staats’s article, New Opioid Guidelines: A Back to Basics Approach, he discusses:
- Nuances of the opioid guidelines
- The influence of patients’ pain scores
- The prescription trend over time
1 Centers For Disease Control And Pre. Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain. Journal of Pain & Palliative Care Pharmacotherapy. 2016Jun2;30(2). http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.rr6501e1