Medical community in ‘civil war’ over painkillers

In the face of the country’s opioid epidemic and a push to restrict patients’ access to addictive painkillers, the medical community is sharply divided over how to treat people with chronic pain.

“There’s a civil war in the pain community,” Daniel B. Carr, M.D., president of the American Academy of Pain Medicine, told STAT. On the one side are doctors who want to curtail opioid prescribing and on the other side are physicians who want to relieve the suffering of patients who live in chronic pain.

It’s a divide that doctors worried about immediately after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released strict new guidelines last March to limit prescribing of opioid painkillers in reaction to a growing number of overdoses and deaths involving prescription opioids and heroin. Many worried how doctors would balance limiting opioids and still treat patients who need them for chronic pain.

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More than half of physicians in the U.S. are writing fewer opioid prescriptions and nearly one in 10 have stopped prescribing the painkillers altogether, according to a recent survey.

That begs the question of what happens to patients who truly need the medication to treat severe pain. Unfortunately, there are no easy answers and further uncertainty around the the incoming Trump administration; he has indicated he might further restrict opioids.