GREED –
Oct. 23, 2019 – Medical professionals are trying to reverse course by increasing education and training and making policy changes around prescribing practices. In 2016, the organization Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing sent a lettersigned by more than 60 doctors and other medical professionals to the Joint Commission raising concerns about “the unintended consequence of encouraging aggressive opioid use in hospitalized patients and upon discharge.”
The letter made note of a study that found that physicians prescribed opioids, often in high doses, in more than half of 1.14 million nonsurgical hospital admissions. “Patients suffering from pain require compassionate, evidence-based care,” the doctors wrote. “Medication is not the only way to manage pain and should not be over-emphasized. Setting unrealistic expectations for pain relief can lead to dissatisfaction with care even when best efforts have been made to resolve pain. Aggressive management of pain should not be equated with quality healthcare as it can result in unhelpful and unsafe treatment, the end point of which is often the inappropriate provision of opioids.”
