How Pain Patients Feel About the Opioid Crisis

By Pat Anson, PNN Editor

We received an overwhelming response from readers to Diana’s Franklin guest column on how the opioid crisis has affected her. Diana has suffered from scoliosis since she was a child and now has degenerative disc disease. For many years oxycodone helped Diana manage her chronic back pain, but she can no longer get it.

Diana considers herself collateral damage of a crisis she had nothing to do with.

“The government stopped allowing my doctor to prescribe any opioids, leaving many of his patients, including myself, without any pain medication at all,” Diana wrote.

“I can hardly get up to go across the room without help and every step causes extreme pain. I can't think straight and wind up exhausted because every ounce of energy I have goes to fighting the pain.”

Diana’s story hit home with hundreds of readers who left comments or sent us emails.

“Just recently my doctor said that he was gonna have to stop prescribing me my opioid pain medication,” wrote Jeffrey Ticich, who suffers from scoliosis, stenosis, a herniated disc, and recently had his right leg amputated.

“When my doctor takes my opioid pain medication away from me, I will start looking for a burial plot. I have suffered most of my life with severe chronic acute pain and I will not suffer anymore. There has got to be a solution for patients that are suffering and not abusing their opiate pain medication.”

“I am a disabled law enforcement officer. I was hurt in a car crash years ago responding to a rape in progress. The only way I've had any quality of life is with the pain medication,” wrote a man who didn’t want his name used. “Life has been really rough since (they) restricted pain medication. Also think of all the injured veterans. What a way to say thanks for your service.”

“I've suffered with neuropathy for almost 15 years. It's very painful, especially in my lower legs. I find it difficult to even walk to the mailbox and back,” said Leslie Rowland, who is 70. “I too am a case of collateral damage when it comes to pain meds. I've loved to fish all my life but had to give it up this year due to the pain. Please, someone with a voice needs to be heard for people like me. All I want is not to be in pain 24/7 and to have a decent quality of life.”

CDC Guideline Unchanged

Many pain patients thought their voices were finally being heard last April, when CDC Director Robert Redfield, MD, acknowledged that many insurers, pharmacies, states and practitioners were implementing the agency’s 2016 opioid guideline as a mandatory policy.

“The Guideline does not endorse mandated or abrupt dose reduction or discontinuation, as these actions can result in patient harm. The Guideline includes recommendations for clinicians to work with patients to taper or reduce dosage only when patient harm outweighs patient benefit of opioid therapy,” said Redfield.

“CDC is working diligently to evaluate the impact of the Guideline and clarify its recommendations to help reduce unintended harms.”

Five months later, not a word of the CDC guideline has changed. And many doctors, insurers and pharmacies are still reducing opioid dosages or cutting off patients.   

“My pain doctor keeps reducing my pain medicine dose to the point that it's almost ineffective, thanks to our government's unrealistic guidelines. And instead of going after the real culprits of the problem (the dealers), they're putting the blame on the doctors,” wrote Richard Parrish. “Those of us who really need help are paying the price for our inept government's prescribing guidelines. THIS HAS GOT TO STOP!”

“I have been in pain since last October from neck pain that travels to the back of my ear from whiplash,” wrote Lois Henkin. “I have been to all kinds of doctors, had physical therapy, had facet joint shots, cervical steroid shots, etc. with no change in the pain.

“I was put on gabapentin for the pain, with no results. I switched to Tramadol, which works, but now because of the opioid crisis, I am not even given 1 pill a day. This is not fair to people that have severe pain. Just limit the meds to the drug addicts.”

Many readers, like Debra Christian, said they felt abandoned and misunderstood.

“Unless you live in chronic pain, then you don't understand it, nor do you know what it does to a person and how it changes the person they were,” Christian wrote. “We don't have lives. We’re just existing.

“This is a problem. This is a travesty. This is a financial burden. And I am an American who wants to still work, but I can’t. It will be up to me to fight with whatever strength I have left, if I want any quality from my life that I and so many others deserve.”

In PNN’s recent survey of nearly 6,000 patients, over 85 percent said the guideline has made their pain and quality of life worse. Nearly half say they have considered suicide because their pain is poorly treated.

CDC: Opioid Guideline Should Not Be Used to Taper Patients

By Pat Anson, PNN Editor

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has taken its first concrete step to address the widespread misuse and misapplication of its opioid prescribing guideline.

In a commentary published in The New England Journal of Medicine, the guideline’s authors say the agency does not support abrupt tapering or discontinuation of opioid medication, and that the guideline’s recommendation that daily doses be limited to no more than 90 MME (morphine milligram equivalent) should only be applied to patients who are starting opioid therapy.

“Unfortunately, some policies and practices purportedly derived from the guideline have in fact been inconsistent with, and often go beyond, its recommendations,” wrote Deborah Dowell, MD, Tamara Haegerich, PhD, and Roger Chou, MD. “A consensus panel has highlighted these inconsistencies, which include inflexible application of recommended dosage and duration thresholds and policies that encourage hard limits and abrupt tapering of drug dosages, resulting in sudden opioid discontinuation or dismissal of patients from a physician’s practice.”

The co-authors also noted that the guideline “does not address or suggest discontinuation of opioids already prescribed at higher dosages,” nor does it seek to deny opioids to patients with cancer, sickle cell disease or recovering from surgical procedures.

The CDC’s clarification was cheered by patient advocates, who have been calling on the agency to address the suicides, patient abandonment and other unintended consequences of the guideline for over three years.

“The statement from the CDC is a long-awaited, robust clarification that has come at a critical time. They clearly defined that its Guideline cannot and should not be invoked to justify the forced reduction or denial of opioid pain medication to patients who use opioids to manage their long-term pain,” said Andrea Anderson, a patient advocate with the Alliance for the Treatment of Intractable Pain (ATIP).

The CDC’s controversial guideline was released in March 2016 as a voluntary set of recommendations meant to discourage primary care physicians from prescribing opioids for chronic non-cancer pain. But the guideline was quickly adopted by states, insurers, pharmacies, practitioners and even law enforcement agencies, who saw it as a mandatory policy that all physicians should follow to reduce rates of opioid addiction and overdose.

Reports soon began surfacing of patients being forcibly tapered off opioids or being abandoned by doctors who no longer wanted to treat them. Within months of the guideline’s release, CDC was warned by its own public relations consultants that “doctors are following these guidelines as strict law” and that some patients “are now left with little to no pain management.”

In PNN’s recent survey of nearly 6,000 patients, over 85 percent said the guideline has made their pain and quality of life worse. Nearly half say they have considered suicide because their pain is poorly treated. Many are hoarding opioids because they fear losing access to the drugs and some are turning to other substances – both legal and illegal – for pain relief.

‘Unintended Harms’

Not until this month did CDC acknowledge that its guideline was causing patient harm.

“CDC is working diligently to evaluate the impact of the Guideline and clarify its recommendations to help reduce unintended harms,” CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield wrote in an April 10 letter to a group of healthcare professionals. who had asked the agency to make a “bold clarification” of the guideline.

Redfield’s letter was sent the day after the Food and Drug Administration warned doctors not to abruptly taper or discontinue opioids. The FDA said it had received reports of “serious harm” to patients, including withdrawal, uncontrolled pain, psychological distress and suicide.    

“The clarification is an essential beginning because it is the CDC guideline that has been used by law enforcement agencies to surveil doctors and by major insurers and pharmacies in ways that deny pain patients access to opioid analgesia,” said Kate Nicholoson, a civil rights attorney and pain patient.  

“It is the CDC guideline that has been used by law enforcement agencies to surveil doctors and by major insurers and pharmacies in ways that deny pain patients access to opioid analgesia.”

— Kate Nicholson, Civil Rights Attorney

“Given the harms suffered by pain patients, a muscular, public-facing clarification from the CDC was needed. We hope that this action and the warning the FDA issued last week against abrupt tapering of pain patients will mark a beginning in protecting the rights of patients who use opioid medication appropriately to manage pain.” 

But other patient advocates wonder why it took so long for the CDC to act.

“It's gratifying to see CDC admit that its guideline is being misinterpreted and misapplied, as many of us have been warning for some time,” said Bob Twillman, PhD, former Executive Director of the Association of Integrative Pain Management. “It's a bit puzzling to me why it has taken them three years to do so, when many of us, myself included, told them within days of the guideline's issuance that these things were going to happen.

“Unfortunately, we've spent the past three years watching three dozen states violate CDC's stated intent that the guideline not be legislated, not to mention the untold numbers of insurance companies, health care systems, private practices, and pharmacy chains that have created a whole population of opioid refugees by misusing the guideline. Serious harms, including patient deaths, have resulted, and there is virtually no evidence that the intended effect of reducing prescription opioid overdose deaths has occurred, while overall opioid overdose deaths continue to climb rapidly.”

The New England Journal of Medicine is a respected publication with a wide reach among healthcare professionals, but it is not clear what CDC will do to caution states, insurers, pharmacies and law enforcement agencies about their misuse of the guideline.

“Unless Congress and the Executive Branch tell the DEA (and by association, state drug enforcement authorities and prosecutors) to stand down from persecuting doctors, I don't see any useful impact for this statement at all,” Richard “Red” Lawhern, PhD, of ATIP wrote in an email. “Doctors will continue to leave pain management and to desert their patients until they can be assured they will not be sanctioned, so long as they act in good faith to treat pain and manage their patients.” 

In recent months, federal prosecutors in Wisconsin and several other states sent letters to hundreds of physicians warning them that their opioid prescribing practices exceed those recommended by the CDC. The doctors were identified through data-mining of prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs), which have been weaponized to target physicians. 

“Practitioners were identified where they prescribed on average 90 MMEs (or more) per patient per day. That’s the threshold where the CDC and the Wisconsin Medical Examining Board say there is no real evidence to suggest that above that amount has any better effect on chronic pain,” a DOJ spokesperson told PNN.  

Just last week, a DEA task force charged dozens of doctors and other healthcare providers with illegal opioid prescribing. Prosecutors say more criminal cases are in the pipeline. 

"We have hyper-accurate data at the DEA and other agencies in the federal government where we are able to (use) that data and we can sort of pinpoint where these pills are being over-prescribed just by the population center in which they're being prescribed," said Jay Town, a federal prosecutor in Alabama.  "There are more doctors out there, there are more people working in clinics, and physicians’ offices, or pharmacies, or in compounding pharmacies, that we still have ongoing investigations or beginning investigations.” 

‘Achieve Widespread Adoption’ 

The CDC may have finally acknowledged the “unintended harms” caused by the guideline, but the data-mining and wholesale adoption of its recommendations are exactly what the agency outlined in a 2015 CDC memo obtained by PNN:   

“Efforts are required to disseminate the guideline and achieve widespread adoption and implementation of the recommendations in clinical settings. CDC is dedicated to translating this guideline into user-friendly materials for distribution and use by health systems, medical professional societies, insurers, public health departments, health information technology developers, and providers, and engaging in dissemination efforts.  

Activities such as development of clinical decision support in electronic health records to assist providers’ treatment decisions at the point of care, identification of mechanisms that insurers and pharmacy benefit plan managers can use to promote safer prescribing within plans, and development of clinical quality improvement measures and initiatives to improve prescribing and patient care.”

Can the CDC undo all the harm its “user-friendly materials” have caused over the last three years? Will states be advised to rollback their laws and regulations? Will insurers and pharmacies be told to stop limiting the dose of opioid prescriptions? And what about the patients who committed suicide? The CDC did not respond to a request for comment.

“That no one at CDC anticipated that the guideline would be misinterpreted and misapplied in this way is hard to swallow,” said Twillman. “I would have hoped that they would be vigilant for such occurrences, and taken action swiftly and effectively when they became apparent.”

CDC Director Says Agency Will ‘Clarify’ Opioid Guideline

By Pat Anson, PNN Editor

CDC Director Robert Redfield, MD, has for the first time suggested that his agency may be preparing to make changes to its controversial opioid prescribing guideline.

“CDC is working diligently to evaluate the impact of the Guideline and clarify its recommendations to help reduce unintended harms,” Redfield wrote in an April 10 letter to Health Professionals for Patients in Pain (HP3). 

Redfield was responding to a March 6 letter from HP3 signed by over 300 healthcare professionals urging the CDC to make a “bold clarification” of the voluntary guideline, which has been implemented as a mandatory policy by many insurers, pharmacies, states and practitioners. As a result, many chronic pain patients have been denied or forcibly tapered off opioid medication and become disabled or bedridden. Some have turned to alcohol and illegal drugs for pain relief.

The situation has become so dire, the Food and Drug Administration issued an unusual warning this week cautioning doctors not to abruptly discontinue or rapidly taper patients on opioid medication. The FDA said it had received reports of “serious harm” to patients, including withdrawal, uncontrolled pain, psychological distress and suicide.    

ROBERT REDFIELD, md

“The Guideline does not endorse mandated or abrupt dose reduction or discontinuation, as these actions can result in patient harm,” Redfield said in his letter, which was released a day after the FDA warning. “The Guideline includes recommendations for clinicians to work with patients to taper or reduce dosage only when patient harm outweighs patient benefit of opioid therapy.”

Redfield has been CDC director for a little over a year. The letter is his most extensive public comment to date on the opioid guideline, which was only intended for primary care physicians treating chronic, non-cancer pain. Redfield emphasized that doctors and patients should collaborate on tapering plans, but only “if a patient would like to taper.”

“The Guideline also recommends that that the plan be based on the patient’s goals and concerns and that tapering be slow enough to minimize opioid withdrawal,” Redfield said.

“We are so grateful to the CDC for its essential clarification,” said Sally Satel, MD, of the American Enterprise Institute and Yale University, who helped draft the HP3 letter. “Now it’s time for the federal, state, and non-governmental institutions that have invoked the CDC’s authority to push some traumatic changes to care to reverse course.”

‘Closing the Barn Door’

But critics wonder why it took the CDC three years to acknowledge that the guideline has been widely implemented beyond its initial intent.

“I find it striking that, while CDC has made statements from time to time about their intent that the guideline not be turned into legislation and regulations, this is the boldest statement they've made yet, and it's coming only after more than 35 states have legislated some part of the guideline, not to mention actions by payers,” said Bob Twillman, PhD, former Executive Director of the Association of Integrative Pain Management.

“If they truly did not anticipate that this was going to happen, then they were incredibly naive, because many of us made public statements predicting these outcomes at the time the guideline was released. I know there are some patient advocates who hope this will lead to the unwinding of some of the legislation, but I think that's a very long-term project. In other words, it's a bit like closing the barn door after the horse has already escaped.”

When it released its opioid guideline in 2016, the CDC pledged to evaluate its intended and unintended consequences and said it would make changes to the recommendations if needed. Redfield’s letter contains a 3-page enclosure that summarizes the agency’s efforts to evaluate the impact of the guideline. A careful reading of the enclosure, however, shows that most of the studies underway are not being conducted by the CDC itself and that they focus primarily on whether the guideline has been successful in reducing opioid prescriptions — not whether patients are being harmed by it.

“Honestly, I don't think it's such a bad thing that CDC is supporting outside work to assess the impact of the guideline. Having independent researchers who may not be as likely to feel a need to defend the guideline can only be helpful,” said Twillman.

“I sense this is a political delaying action to avoid having to admit that CDC was fundamentally wrong,” said Richard “Red” Lawhern, PhD, Director of Research for the Alliance for the Treatment of Intractable Pain (ATIP). “The Director of CDC letter has doubled down on several ‘initiatives’ which appear to assume that the original assumptions and declarations of the guidelines were correct -- which they weren't, and for which there is abundant published proof that they weren't.”

Lawhern wrote an open letter to Redfield this week, calling for CDC guideline to be revoked, not just clarified, because many of its key assumptions about the addictive potential of prescription opioids are wrong.

In PNN’s recent survey of nearly 6,000 patients, over 85 percent said the guideline has made their pain and quality of life worse. Nearly half say they have considered suicide because their pain is poorly treated. Many patients are hoarding opioids because they fear losing access to them and some are turning to other substances – both legal and illegal – for pain relief.

An Open Letter to the CDC Center for Injury Prevention

By Richard “Red” Lawhern, Guest Columnist

Dear Dr. Robert Redfield and Dr. Debra Houry,

By its passive refusal to conduct a thorough review of the impact and outcomes of its 2016 opioid prescribing guideline, the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control is actively causing harm to hundreds of thousands of pain patients.   

Deserted by their doctors in a hostile regulatory environment, many are going into the streets seeking pain relief.  Possibly hundreds may already be dead of illegal fentanyl poisoning or suicide.  Military veterans, in particular, face draconian restrictions on the availability of safe and effective opioid medication therapy.   

And all for no good reason!

I suggest with every intention of professional and personal courtesy, that government organizations can no longer stand aside from this centrally important issue.  Such a stance will make you and other federal agencies accessories to state-sanctioned torture and negligent homicide.  That is unacceptable.   

As a former military officer, I respect a well-tried motto that I urge each of our regulators to take on as their own:   

      Lead, follow, or get out of the way! 

It has become clear that the CDC guideline must be immediately withdrawn for a major rewrite.  In its present form, the guideline is unjustifiably biased against opioid pain relievers, factually incomplete, in error on basic science, and founded on untested assumptions that do not hold up under any degree of careful scrutiny.   

The guideline is directly responsible for a vast regulatory over-reach by DEA and state authorities that is driving doctors out of pain management and denying safe and effective pain treatment for hundreds of thousands of patients.  

The CDC guideline has been publicly repudiated by no less an authority than the American Medical Association. Over 300 medical professionals have called for a rewrite of the guideline from the ground up. And a recent draft report by a federal task force calls for a reorientation of the guideline towards individualized patient-centered care, not the one-size-fits-all approach of the CDC. 

Multiple published papers have conclusively invalidated the guideline’s contention that there is a maximum dose threshold of risk for opioid addiction and overdose.   

Likewise, contrary to assertions in the guideline, there are presently no validated long-term studies to support the use of non-opioid analgesics and NSAIDs, or the off-label prescribing of anti-seizure and anti-depressant drugs to treat pain. No Phase II or Phase III trials have been published on "alternative" techniques such as acupuncture, massage or meditation.  And there are no trials which directly compare these techniques to opioid therapy under documented protocols.  Alternative treatments can at best be regarded as adjuncts to be added to analgesic or anti-inflammatory treatment.  

Published papers also demonstrate that criteria used by CDC and other federal agencies to identify risk of opioid abuse or overdose have very limited predictive accuracy. These faulty criteria are now being used by Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMP’s) to "flag" patients presumed to be at risk, who are in fact not at risk but are being denied pain treatment due to false alarms.  

Opioids, Overdoses and Demographics 

We can now take this narrative a step further.  I have compiled overdose data directly from the CDC Wonder database and from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Data. This data focuses specifically on deaths directly attributable to opioid-related overdoses or suicide. The chart below shows rates of mortality by age group from 1999 to 2017.

GRAPHICS BY RED LAWHERN

Note that the highest rates of opioid-related mortality are among youth and young adults, while the lowest rates are among people over age 55.  Moreover, mortality in youth has skyrocketed by 1,800% over 17 years, while remaining relatively stable in people 55 and older.

The chart below documents the contrast in opioid prescribing by age group in 2016.  Unsurprisingly, older adults and seniors are much more likely to experience chronic pain and are prescribed opioids at a rate nearly double that of young adults. These two demographic trends contradict the idea that opioid overdoses are linked to prescribing.  They’re not and the evidence proves it. 

An updated analysis report further summarizes major themes we found in the overdose data.  The report reveals that “over-prescribing” of medical opioids was never a significant driver in opioid overdoses. There is no cause-and-effect relationship between rates of opioid prescribing versus rates of opioid overdose. In fact, it can be argued that in states where prescribing rates are highest, the trend may be in the opposite direction. 

The downward sloping red line in the chart below is called a "regression" line.  This is the trend line for the overdose and prescribing data from all 50 states in 2016. If there were a connection between high rates of opioid prescribing and overdoses, we’d expect the regression line to be pointing upward, not downward.

Overdose mortality rates are actually lower in high-prescribing states! 

One plausible explanation for the downward sloping line is that in states where prescribing has been more suppressed, patients are being driven into unsafe street markets or are committing suicide when overwhelmed by pain.   

These findings have previously been published in the blog of Dr. Lynn Webster, former President of the American Academy of Pain Medicine and author of "The Painful Truth." 

The implications of this analysis are glaring: the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control has created a fatally flawed guideline which actively increases injury rather than reducing it.   

Taken in sum, the evidence reveals that key assumptions on which the CDC guideline is based are simply and conclusively wrong.  Continued refusal to reevaluate the guideline is morally, ethically, medically and legally wrong. The 2016 CDC guideline on opioids must be retracted.  NOW! 

(Editor’s note: Dr. Redfield is CDC Director and Dr. Houry is Director of the CDC National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. A longer version of this open letter has been sent by email to other federal agencies and officials.)

Richard “Red” Lawhern, PhD, has for over 20 years volunteered as a patient advocate in online pain communities and a subject matter expert on public policy for medical opioids.  Red is co-founder and Director of Research for The Alliance for the Treatment of Intractable Pain.

The information in this column should not be considered as professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. It is for informational purposes only and represents the author’s opinions alone. It does not inherently express or reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of Pain News Network.

Rising Overdoses Show CDC Guideline Not Working

By Pat Anson, PNN Editor

Rising suicides and drug overdose deaths led to another decline in U.S. left expectancy last year, according to two sobering reports released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Americans born in 2017 are expected to live 78.6 years, about one month less than those born in 2016. Life expectancy has fallen or remained flat in the U.S. for three consecutive years. The UK is the only other country in the industrialized world where life expectancy is dropping.

“Tragically, this troubling trend is largely driven by deaths from drug overdose and suicide. Life expectancy gives us a snapshot of the Nation’s overall health and these sobering statistics are a wakeup call that we are losing too many Americans, too early and too often, to conditions that are preventable,” CDC director Robert Redfield, MD, said in a statement.

Redfield, who almost lost a son to a drug overdose, has been nearly invisible since becoming CDC director in March. He has previously called the opioid epidemic “the public health crisis of our time” and pledged to “bring this epidemic to its knees.”

So far, the CDC’s strategies, including its controversial 2016 opioid prescribing guideline, are not working. As PNN has reported, the guideline may even be contributing to the rising number of suicides and overdoses.

Over 70,200 people died of a drug overdose in 2017 – the highest number on record and nearly a 10 percent increase from 2016. Deaths involving illicit fentanyl and other synthetic, mostly black market opioids surged 45 percent, while deaths involving natural or semisynthetic opioids, mostly painkillers such as oxycodone and hydrocodone, remained flat.  The rate of heroin deaths also remained unchanged.

SOURCE: CDC

CDC researchers noted that their data is flawed. Drug overdose deaths often involve multiple drugs, and “a single death might be included in more than one drug category.” A death “involving” a specific drug also doesn’t mean that drug was the cause of death. It only means the drug was present at the time of death.  The competency of medical examiners and coroners who complete death certificates can also vary widely from state to state.

The CDC reported that over 47,000 people committed suicide last year, nearly 4 percent more than in 2016. Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death among all age groups – and the 2nd leading cause of death among adolescents and young adults aged 10 to 34.

Reports Ignored Role of Antidepressants, ADHD Drugs

The CDC reports did not explore the role of drugs used to treat depression, anxiety and attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD) in either suicides or overdoses.

According to a recent study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), Xanax, Valium, Adderall and other psychotherapeutic drugs were involved in more overdoses in 2016 than prescription opioids.

A report this week from the Research Abuse Diversion and Addiction Related Surveillance System (RADARS), which tracks illicit drug use nationwide, underscores that emerging trend. RADARS found that the abuse of ADHD stimulants now exceeds the abuse of prescription opioids by Americans aged 19 or younger. The rising trend in “intentional exposures” to stimulants – which includes suicide – began in 2010 and is accelerating.    

PEDIATRIC CASES OF UNINTENTIONAL EXPOSURE (SOURCE: RADARS)

“There have been more pediatric exposures involving stimulants than pediatric exposures involving natural/semi-synthetic opioid analgesics in every quarter since 4th quarter 2014. The increase appears to be driven by exposures where the intent of the patient was suicide,” the RADARS report found. 

“Multiple factors may contribute to the observed increase in suspected suicide exposures. The increase may reflect overall increases in suicides in the United States. It may also be a result of increases in stimulant misuse.” 

In the 2nd quarter of 2018, there were 822 reported cases of intentional exposure to stimulants among young people, while there were 503 cases involving opioid analgesics.

CDC Head Wants Opioid Guidelines for Acute Pain

By Pat Anson, Editor

When Dr. Robert Redfield was appointed as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in March, he told CDC staff the opioid epidemic was “the public health crisis of our time” and pledged to “bring this epidemic to its knees.”

After three months in the job, Redfield has finally given his first media interview and provided some vague details about how he will tackle the opioid crisis. He told The Wall Street Journal that the CDC would develop opioid prescribing guidelines for short-term acute pain and use a new enhanced data system to track overdoses in hospital emergency rooms.

“We’re going to continue to expand our efforts,” Redfield said. “We’re going to be able to track this epidemic in real time, which I think is really important to be able to respond.”

The CDC has been roundly criticized in the past for how it tracked and counted opioid overdoses – erroneously mixing illicit fentanyl deaths with those linked to prescription opioids – so any improvement in that area is welcome.

DR. ROBERT REDFIELD.

But for the agency to even consider prescribing guidelines for acute pain is puzzling – considering how disastrous its guidelines have been for chronic pain. Since their botched release during a sketchy webinar in 2015, the CDC’s “voluntary” guidelines for primary care physicians have been widely adopted as mandatory by insurers, regulators and providers – who have used them to deny treatment, abandon patients, and forcibly taper many off opioid prescriptions. The DEA even targets physicians who exceed the CDC's recommended dosage for opioids. 

“I was forced tapered. How could the CDC take over my medical treatment? How is this legal? The CDC had never assessed me yet changed my pain medicine,” PNN reader Patti asks.  “I've gone from being an active woman to spending my days in bed or on the couch. I live in non-stop pain 24/7.”

Patti is not alone. In a PNN survey of over 3,100 patients last year, over 90% said the CDC guidelines have been harmful to patients and nearly half said it was harder for them to find a doctor willing to treat their pain. Ten percent don't have a doctor at all.

There are also troubling reports of patients committing suicide because their pain is so poorly treated.

"My son committed suicide 4 months after his docs took him off all pain meds," said Rick. "I knew right then the reason for his suicide. But, it goes unrecognized by doctors and other officials, and his suicide autopsy mentioned nothing about pain meds. This will continue, suicides vastly increased until post medicinal suicides (are) recognized and accounted for."

"My 70 year old mother committed suicide last month after being cut off at pain management. Although she could barely walk and was in constant pain, she was the most positive person. Something needs to be done," said Janie Jacobs.

“Wishing for it to be over is a pervasive daily thought. I have to work diligently to chase those thoughts away,” pain patient Leanne Gooch wrote in a recent guest column for PNN. “My doctors can’t or won’t treat me because my chronic pain contributed to all the addicts all over the world. I’ll admit that’s a ridiculous statement when they admit they’ve gone too far in denying me proper medical care.”   

The quality of pain care in the U.S. has gotten so bad that Human Rights Watch launched an investigation into the treatment of pain patients as a possible human rights violation.

“What kind of quality of life do I even have when I can barely move?” asks Amy, who suffers from myofascial pain and is confined to a wheelchair.  “I really want to lead a functional life and to have a family. It's not a lot to ask. I'll never have it this way, though. Please give me back some tramadol. Please allow me hydrocodone if I really need it. Please help me. Please help all of us.”

The CDC guidelines have also failed to achieve a key objective. While opioid prescribing has declined (a trend that began years before the guidelines were released), opioid overdoses have spiked higher, driven by a scourge of illegal opioids sold on the black market. Americans are now more likely to die from an overdose of illicit fentanyl than they are from pain medication.

Several states and insurers have already adopted regulations limiting the initial use of opioids for acute pain to a few days supply. The CDC has weighed in on the issue as well.

"When opioids are used for acute pain, clinicians should prescribe the lowest effective dose of immediate-release opioids and should prescribe no greater quantity than needed for the expected duration of pain severe enough to require opioids. Three days or less will often be sufficient; more than seven days will rarely be needed," the agency says in its chronic pain guidelines. 

According to a spokesperson, the CDC was working with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to develop a report reviewing the effectiveness of opioid and non-opioid therapies for acute pain.

"If an update to the CDC Guideline is warranted based on the scientific findings of these AHRQ efforts, CDC will undertake the scientific process to update the guideline, possibly including expanded guidance treating acute pain," Courtney Leland told PNN in an email.

Why does Dr. Redfield want to develop guidelines for acute pain? In his interview with The Wall Street Journal,  Redfield said his interest stems, in part, from a close family member’s struggle with opioid addiction.

“I think part of my understanding of the epidemic has come from seeing it not just as a public-health person and not just as a doctor,” he said. “It is something that has impacted me also at a personal level.”

The epidemic is also impacting chronic pain patients, in ways the CDC has yet to admit or acknowledge.