MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — A trend of prescribing opioids as the first line of defense for pain in the late 90’s and early 2000’s led to scary addiction statistics more than a decade later.
“Oh my goodness. It’s a crisis in the United States and particularly the epidemic is really just of enormous proportions in West Virginia,” proclaimed G. Daniel Martich, M.D., WVU Medicine chief medical officer.
Martich, a recent guest on WAJR’s Morgantown AM, said the problem is so bad in West Virginia the number of drug overdose deaths in recent years in the Mountain State has been twice the national average.
This week, WVU Health System announced adopting Centers for Disease Control guidelines on prescribing opioids to help reduce addiction statistics.
“If you need opioids, it’s ‘start low and go slow’. But, really consider non-pharmacologic therapies, cognitive behavioral therapy and exercise therapy,” Martich generally summarized.
Martich, a critical care physician who specializes in intensive care medicine, explained chronic pain as lasting for 3 months. He said for chronic pain sufferers and cancer patients and end-of-life care, stronger prescription medicines may be necessary.
Otherwise, according to the Martich and those CDC guidelines, pharmacological pain treatment should begin with “things like non-steroidal anti inflammatory drugs, Motrin or ibuprofen or that class of medications that help alleviate pain.”
In 2012, according to the CDC, 20 percent of patients who entered a doctor’s office with non-cancer pain left with an opioid prescription. The same year 260 million prescriptions for opioid pain medications were written.
Physicians within WVU Health System will continue to discuss risks with patients prior to immediately prescribing opioids.
“That unintended consequence of the opioid use is addiction, having someone else use your medication for an overdose potential death. There are any number of complications. Those are obviously the most serious, those that end in death,” Martich added.
The CDC announced the agency’s prescribing guidelines in May.