The news media is hooked on the opioid prescription drug abuse story. Every day, it seems, I read a new announcement:
- The CDC has issued guidelines for prescribing opioids for chronic pain.
- The FDA has announced immediate-release pain medications will need to have “black box” warning labels about the risk of addiction, abuse, overdosing and even death.
- The White House has requested $1.1 billion in its 2017 budget to combat opioid abuse.
Some are quick to blame the medical community for opioid prescription drug abuse. People need to know that good physicians, like me, followed medical education in chasing the pain scale and high opioid prescriptions. Now we have the much harder task of re-educating the medical community from what has been wrongly taught.
San Diego County, with about 1 percent of the U.S. population, has been ravaged with prescription deaths for decades, similar to the rest of our nation. Physicians can benefit what we learned in San Diego to fight this crisis.
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