Opioid prescribing in the UK: can we avert a public health disaster?

Opioid prescribing in the UK: can we avert a public health disaster?

Excerpts:

"Jane Ballantyne and Jianren Mao published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine in which they sounded a number of cautionary notes.1 They pointed out that opioids are not all good news when used in the long term and, in particular, the way that opioids are used in clinical practice cannot be justified from the information we derive from clinical trials. A year later there were more loud noises off. An editorial in Pain described a developing epidemic of opioid misuse in parallel with the marked and progressive rise in opioid prescribing.2 The debate shifted from ‘Why not prescribe opioids?’ to ‘Why not to prescribe opioids?’"

"The Office for National Statistics records data on all drug-related deaths. A review of the 2010 data show unchanged or falling death rates in relation to co-codamol, co-dydramol and dihydrocodeine; a steady increase in deaths from tramadol since 2003 (87 tramadol-related deaths in 2009 and 132 deaths in 2010); and a rise in codeine-related deaths from 2006 to 2009, which now seems to have stabilised.19"

[link to www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov (secure)]

SNIP---------------------------------------------

Gee, lookit that... Francis is just inches away form being a statistic!

He should probably find a safe alternative to pain mitigation, like for example, cannabis.







Last Edited by MountainTux NLI on 01/05/2019 05:34 PM