Posts Tagged ‘opiates’

What Will Replace Opiates?

Sunday, March 27th, 2016

Prescription opiate medication for chronic pain is a treatment whose time is ending.  To quote Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Center for Disease Control (CDC), for most pain patients the benefits of opiate painkillers are “unproven and transient” and they can be “just as addictive as heroin.”  In addition, annually since 1999, ten thousand people have died from overdoses of prescription painkillers.  The pain management community has concluded that, apart from people with cancer pain or those at the end of life, opiate painkillers have become a public health crisis.  The CDC now recommends against using them for most non-cancer patients.

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