Opioid prescribing is still high and varies widely throughout the US

Nationally, the CDC said great variation remains among counties, with the highest-prescribing ones doling out six times more opioids per resident in 2015 than the lowest-prescribing ones.

The high amount of opioids prescribed is continuing to drive drug overdoses and drug overdose deaths, she said.

“Enough for every American to be on an opioid medicine, round the clock, for three weeks”. Still, other data say the problem is not improving, including the same CDC report, which notes that rates vary widely from county to county.

“As this continued, more opioid prescriptions were written, for more days per prescription, in higher doses”.

According to the report, there needs to better guidelines for physicians prescribing these pills across the board ― and doctors especially need to take them seriously.

However, the number of patients getting opioids is still too high, and doctors are giving their patients prescriptions that last longer, according to the report in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

“What happens with chronic pain is that opioids, even high-dose opioids, won’t make chronic pain go away”, Schuchat said.

People recovering from surgery should be prescribed low doses for a short amount of time, and those with chronic back pain or arthritis should try alternative pain management methods.

There are other indications that opioid prescriptions have been dropping for the last two years.

“Anyone taking opioids can become addicted to them”. The prescribing rates for these longer supplies of the drug jumped 58.9 percent between 2006 and 2012, from 17.6 to 28 prescriptions per 100 persons.

2 On Your Side obtained county-level data for all of Western New York.

The CDC looked at changes in opioid prescribing nationwide between 2006 and 2015 and found prescribing peaked in 2010. Previously, they had been reserved for patients suffering severe pain from conditions such as cancer. These top counties were mostly rural areas where a majority of residents are white, have higher unemployment rates, and have poor health status. “Even neighboring counties can have a major difference in prescribing levels”.

“Despite the observed reductions in opioid prescribing, opioid-involved overdose death rates continue to increase”. These individuals are at an increased risk for abusing prescription opioids, according to research. What they found is that four years after the acquisitions in 2007, average physician prices in the acquired practices were 32-47 percent higher than expected in absence of the acquisitions.

The critical shortage of treatment for people with opioid use disorder also has complicated plans by the President Trump and Republicans in Congress to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Duration of opioid prescription has been linked as directly correlated with addition liability to these drugs. When Marijuana.com spoke to Dr. James Feeney, the Hartford, Connecticut trauma surgeon leading one of the first government-approved studies into the use of cannabis as a replacement for opioid painkillers in the treatment of acute pain, he credited the advent of the epidemic to the American medical community adopting physical pain as the “5th vital sign“, creating a culture where numb is normal.

Get help if you’re having trouble controlling your opioid use.