![]() Providing a prescription for 60 or 90 pills makes sense considering this barrier. Therefore, a patient actually has to come back to clinic to pick up a prescription, which causes inconvenience to both the patient and the prescriber. The second is that, in many states, it is impossible to phone in a prescription for a controlled substance (e.g. The first is that surgeons, appropriately, do not want their patients to suffer from pain after an operation. I believe there are two likely explanations. Why are opioids prescribed often and in larger amounts?Ī key question is why overprescribing after surgery is occurring. Despite this, the study discovered that only 4% to 30% planned to dispose of the medications and only 4% to 9% planned to use a safe disposal method. It's not safe to flush them down the toilet as they can contaminate our water supply, but most police stations and now commercial pharmacies have bins where unused medications can be safely disposed. Multiple government and public health agencies recommend discarding unused opioids. Furthermore, 16% to 29% of patients experienced adverse effects directly attributed to the opioids. In the era of the opioid epidemic, where we know that the vast majority of pills taken for non-medical reasons (e.g., abuse) are obtained from friends or family members, the results are staggering: 42% to 71% of the prescribed opioids went unused. The paper was a meta-analysis that combined the results of six previous studies investigating use of opioids by patients after seven different surgical procedures. This story, repeated time and again, is interesting in light of a recent study published in JAMA Surgery. The problem of adverse effects and unused opioids Had he continued treating his withdrawal with oxycodone, he may have become hooked. ![]() Fortunately, he had the insight to recognize what was going on: he was withdrawing from the opioid, even after taking it for only a few days. He took another oxycodone and felt better. But after discontinuing the medication, he began feeling terrible, experiencing body aches, restlessness, and insomnia. After the pain began to subside and acetaminophen and ibuprofen were sufficient, he stopped using the oxycodone. For the first couple of days, he had significant pain and used the pain pills. He went in for a minor back surgery and was discharged with 60 tablets of oxycodone (the opioid medicine in Percocet and Oxycontin). My son's baseball coach, who is not in the medical field, described it perfectly. My follow-up question to them is usually: "How did it begin?" Almost every time the answer is the same: the individual experienced acute pain either from a trauma or surgery, was started on opioids by a doctor, and then couldn't quit. As a physician with an interest in reducing opioid-related problems, I frequently hear stories from colleagues and friends about their loved ones who either struggle with opioid addiction or have even died from opioid-related overdose.
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