Pain

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid typically used to treat patients with chronic severe pain or severe pain following surgery.  Fentanyl is a Schedule II controlled substance that is similar to morphine but about 100 times more potent.  Under the supervision of a licensed medical professional, fentanyl has a legitimate medical use.  Patients prescribed fentanyl should be monitored for potential misuse or abuse.

Drug overdose is a nationwide epidemic that claimed the lives of over 100,000 people in the United States in the past year.   Opioids, either alone or in combination with other drugs or alcohol, were responsible for approximately 70 percent of these deaths. Many of those 70,000 people would be alive today if they had been administered the opioid antagonist naloxone and, where needed, other emergency care. 

Summary of innovation abstracts that were presented at the National Academy of Medicine’s recent Stigma of Addiction Summit.

People suffering from addiction or people who are in recovery from the condition, face a variety of challenges, including, in many cases, in their interactions with health-care services. Many of these challenges may be attributed to the stigma that still clings unhelpfully to addiction. It may also be due to a surprising lack of awareness even among health-care professionals about the nature of addiction and the susceptibilities and anxieties of those initiating or attempting to sustain recovery. This review and report is a starting point, an attempt to get a handle on the state of play and the issues that need addressing when it comes to pain management in people with current or past addictions. It helps to identify gaps in knowledge, understanding, skill, practice and culture, pointing the way to how these deficiencies might be remedied.

This e-book was designed to empower patients with opioid use disorder who will be having surgery.

Overreliance on opioid medications is emblematic of a health care system that incentivizes quick, simplistic answers to complex physical and mental health needs.

The United States is in the midst of an epidemic of prescription opioid overdoses. The amount of opioids prescribed and sold in the US quadrupled since 1999, but the overall amount of pain reported by Americans hasn’t changed. This epidemic is devastating American lives, families, and communities.