Tag Archives: Opioids

Traditional and Battlefield Acupuncture Provide Post-Op Pain Relief and Reduced Need for Opioids

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PainRelief.com Interview with:

  • Brinda Krish, D.O., lead author of the study and an anesthesiology resident at Detroit Medical Center.
  • Padmavathi Patel, M.D., principal investigator of the study and Medical Director, Northstar Anesthesia at John D. Dingell Veteran Hospital.

PainRelief.com:  What is the background for this study?  What are the main findings?

Dr. Padmavathi Patel: Pain is a major contributor to health care costs and a common cause of long-term disability (about  $61.2 billion/year) in lost productivity due to pain.

acupuncture

76.2 million Americans (one in four) have suffered from pain that lasts longer than 24 hours (2013).

Numerous literature such as:

1. “Use of prescription opioids in the treatment of pain has increased notably over recent decades.”

2. “Rates of death from prescribed opioids increased four fold between 2000 and 2014.”

3. “16,651 opioid related deaths in 2010.”

4. “The problem of opioid overuse and dependence is seen in the military as well as in civilian.”

-Opioid-related side effects could lead to a delay in recovery.
-Pain control is more challenging for military population.
-More extensive injuries and greater pain severity is seen in survivors of combat- related blast injuries compared to those of non-blast civilians and also they require larger opioid doses.
-Pain is a very common patient complaint, both in veteran and non-veteran populations.
-Among the 5.7 million unique patients seen annually with in the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA), more than half of these patients experience chronic pain.

In 2017, The DVA and the United States Department of Defense (DoD) published an updated guidelines on opioid therapy for chronic pain that strongly recommends against initiation of long-term opioid use and recommends alternatives, including non-pharmacologic therapy, such as Acupuncture, which has been shown to be effective for treating a variety of painful conditions.

Acupuncture techniques have been in existence for centuries, with roots tied to Eastern Asia. Traditional acupuncture involves the insertion of very thin needles at specific trigger points around the body to relieve pain. Battlefield acupuncture (BFA), developed by a U.S. Air Force doctor uses needles that are inserted at various trigger points in the ear. In 2013, $5.4 million was awarded to the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs to teach BFA to healthcare providers in both the military and the Department of Veterans Affairs and assess it.  In light of the opioid epidemic, there is a strong need to decrease perioperative opioid use. Opioid use due to postoperative pain along with perioperative anxiety has been linked to increased length of hospital stay, increased morbidity and mortality, and ultimately higher healthcare costs.

Battlefield acupuncture was introduced into Veterans Health Administration (VHA) in the last few years and in VHA, clinicians of various disciplines (MDs, DOs, PAs, nurse-practitioners), can currently obtain clinical privilege to provide it.

I received the Battlefield acupuncture training at John D. Dingell VA medical Center, Detroit and I was surprised with the outcomes of chronic pain patients. As an anesthesiologist I know pain after the surgery is common, often severe and largely unnecessary. I discussed these concerns with the surgeons and created the protocol to use BFA for general surgical patients and traditional acupuncture for hip replacement patients as an adjuvant to the standard protocol for acute post-surgical pain control.

Effective relief of postoperative pain is vital. Such pain probably prolongs hospital stay, as it can affect all the organ systems with side effects. Post op pain remains grossly under treated, with up to 70% of patients reporting moderate to severe pain following surgery.

Multimodal pain control not only can result in earlier discharge from hospital, but it may also reduce the onset of chronic pain syndromes.

2 studies performed TA (n=21), Controls given sham acupuncture (n=21).  BFA (n=28), Controls given sham acupuncture (n=36). Measured variables included post-operative opioid requirements, postoperative pain, the incidence of PONV, and patient satisfaction scores

Key conclusions use of Battlefield acupuncture and Traditional acupuncture reduced post-operative opioid requirements, post-operative pain scores (pain intensity) and increased patient satisfaction scores.  BFA also reduced PONV in patients.  

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Opioid Epidemic for Pain Relief Has Waned But is Not Over

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PainRelief.com Interview with:
Mario Moric M.S.
Department of Anesthesiology
Rush University Medical
Center Department of Anesthesiology

PainRelief.com:  What is the background for this study?  What are the main findings?

  • Prescription Pain Medicine (PPM) abuse has become a national problem and is now consider an epidemic. In 2012, health care providers wrote 259 million prescriptions for opioid pain medication; enough for every American adult to have a bottle of opioids. 
  • With the recent public information campaign about the epidemic and the possible addictive nature of opioid prescription pain medications, the abuse rates have declined.  We examined data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) public data derived from a national survey. 
  • We have raw data (actual reported rates of PPM abuse, see attached image) and weighted data (corrected for the sampling design).  Looking at the raw data you can see that abuse rates for lifetime use (highest line), past year use (middle red line) and past month use (bottom green line) are all more or less stable until 1998 after which we saw huge increase. From 1998 to 2004 the lifetime use increased 186%, the past year use increased 193% and the past month use increased 183%.  Then the decrease, from 2009 to 2018 the lifetime use decreased 72%, the past year use decreased 90% and the past month use decreased 185%.
  • Using the weighted data, the past year use decreases 26% and was statistically significant, indicating a real world decrease in prescription pain medication abuse.
Prescription Pain Medicine
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How Do Primary Care Physicians Handle Opioids For Patients Seeking Chronic Pain Relief?

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PainRelief.com Interview with:
Laura Militello
Unveil, LLC
Applied Decision Science, LLC

PainRelief.com:  What is the background for this study?

Response: Little is known about how primary care clinicians’ (PCC) approach chronic pain management in the current climate of rapidly changing guidelines and the growing body of research about risks and benefits of opioid therapy. When it comes to pain management, primary care clinicians (PCCs) find themselves in a somewhat unexpected role. Few conditions intersect with a range of specialties (i.e. mental health, orthopedics, endocrinology, etc.), disability, and aberrant behavior in the way that chronic pain does. PCCs find themselves in a position where they are asked to assess and diagnose sometimes vague and diffuse pain, and determine appropriate treatment often before the underlying cause of the pain is well-understood.

A recent cultural shift in the U.S. has created a situation in which a formerly default treatment, prescription opioid therapy, is no longer considered safe or appropriate for many patients with chronic pain. The addictive qualities and overall safety profile of opioid medications have come into sharp focus in recent years, leading to a push to reduce opioid use while also trying to achieve pain relief with little guidance for PCCs about how to manage this change in treatment plans. Others have documented the uneasiness many experience in managing patients with chronic pain. One participant in our study described the sense that opioid prescribing sometimes extends into unexpected and disconcerting territory in this way: “I never signed up to be an enforcer.” The complexity and moral uncertainty (6) associated with managing patients with chronic pain is an important backdrop for the findings from this study.

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Wide Variation in Opioid Prescribing for Pain Relief Following Knee Arthroscopy

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PainRelief.com Interview with:
Benjamin Ukert PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Health Policy and Management
Texas A&M

Mucio Kit Delgado, MD, MS
Department of Emergency Medicine
Perelman School of Medicine
University of Pennsylvania

PainRelief.com:  What is the background for this study?

Response: The opioid epidemic has received a lot of attention and many state policies have been passed to address excessive opioid prescribing and highlight the dangers of opioid use initiation for those who have never been exposed to opioids. We also now know that most patients prescribed opioids for post-operative pain have significant quantities of pills leftover. One study showed that after knee arthroscopy, 50% of patients took no opioids, and 90% took less than 5 pills (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7190545/).

We thought to investigate whether overprescribing is still common, and asked the question whether we now observe low levels of prescribing following knee arthroscopy and whether there are differences in prescribing practices across states.

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Factors Affecting Adults’ Choice of Opioids for Pain Relief

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PainRelief.com Interview with:
Didem Bernard, Ph.D.
Senior Economist
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

PainRelief.com:  What is the background for this study?  What are the main findings?

Response: There had not been any studies on whether patient attitudes about health affect opioid use. A self-reliant health attitude is agreement with the following statements: “I do not need health insurance,” and “I can overcome illness without help from a medically trained person.”

We find that health-related attitudes affect both adults with and without chronic pain treatment similarly. Adults with self-reliant health attitudes are less likely to start and more likely to discontinue opioid use. Exercise is also associated with a higher probability of choosing no analgesic treatments over using opioids. Similarly, among adults who are using opioids for pain treatment, exercise is associated with a higher probability of discontinuing opioid use in the year following opioid initiation.

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Joint Replacement: Have Opioid Prescription Patterns for Pain Relief Changed?

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PainRelief.com Interview with:
Rahul Shah
Medical Student
The University of Texas Medical Branch

PainRelief.com:  What is the background for this study?

Response: The United States has a unique overreliance on opioids for managing both acute and chronic pain, compared to many other developed nations. Opioid misuse and addiction frequently start with large doses of opioids prescribed after surgical interventions. This overprescribing contributes to the high rates of opioid use disorder and overdose deaths in the United States. There have been myriad interventions to curb opioid overprescribing, ranging from the DEA’s hydrocodone rescheduling law to opioid prescribing guidelines issued by the CDC, states and orthopedics specialty organizations. 

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Opioids Frequently Prescribed For Headache Pain Relief

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PainRelief.com Interview with:
Richard B. Lipton, M.D.
Professor, The Saul R. Korey Department of Neurology
Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Professor, Department of Epidemiology & Population Health
Edwin S. Lowe Chair in Neurology
Vice Chair The Saul R. Korey Department of Neurology
Director, Montefiore Headache Center
Albert Einstein College of Medicine

PainRelief.com:  What is the background for this study

Response: Almost everyone with migraine takes acute treatments at the time of attacks to relieve pain and restore function.  Acute treatments include over-the-counter medications. prescription drugs and devices.  The most widely used prescription drugs for migraine are triptans (such as sumatriptan and rizatriptan) and NSAIDs (such as ibuprofen and naproxen). 

Richard B. Lipton, M.D. Professor, The Saul R. Korey Department of Neurology Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Professor, Department of Epidemiology & Population Health Edwin S. Lowe Chair in Neurology Vice Chair The Saul R. Korey Department of Neurology Director, Montefiore Headache Center Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Dr. Lipton

Opioids are not recommended in treatment guidelines as acute treatments for migraine.  Longitudinal studies show that in people with migraine treatment with opioids is associated with dose dependent acceleration of headache frequency and the development of chronic migraine in people with episodic migraine.  The purpose of this study was to determine the relative frequency of opioid use and the characteristics of those who use opioids to treat migraine. The hope is to use this information to develop programs which will encourage guideline compliant treatment.

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Targeting Specific Inflammatory Cells May Offer Enhanced Pain Relief

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PainRelief.com Interview with:
Prof. Dr. Halina Machelska
Department of Experimental Anesthesiology
Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin
Berlin, Germany

Prof. Dr. Halina Machelska Department of Experimental Anesthesiology Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin Berlin, Germany

PainRelief.com:  What is the background for this study?

Response: Pathological pain such as pain resulting from nerve injury is often accompanied by inflammation. This is manifested by accumulation of immune cells, including macrophages, in the damaged tissue. Current research mostly emphasizes the role of these cells in the enhancement of pain. One of the suggested strategies in the basic research is to deplete immune cells from the affected tissue. However, several previous preclinical studies, including our own, have shown that this approach did not sufficiently decrease pain. We think that one of the reasons is that not all immune cells invading damaged tissue are detrimental and in fact, some are needed there to counteract pain.

Macrophages are very heterogeneous and they comprise at least two subpopulations, pro-inflammatory M1 and anti-inflammatory M2 macrophages. Our idea in this study was to promote the analgesic properties of macrophages. We took advantage of the cytokine interleukin-4 (IL-4) to switch macrophages from the M1 to the M2 state.

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Older Adults More Likely to Misuse Opioids for Pain Relief

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PainRelief.com Interview with:

Ty S. Schepis, PhD
Department of Psychology
Texas State University
San Marcos, TX

Ty S. Schepis, PhD Department of Psychology Texas State University San Marcos, TX
Dr. Schepis

PainRelief.com:  What is the background for this study?  What are the main findings?

Response: Prescription opioid misuse motives have been studied in adolescents, young adults, and across the population. One study across the population suggested that older adults differed from younger adults, but this was not fully clear.

We wanted to examine motives across age groups and to investigate the correlates of opioid motive groups in older adults (50 and older). We found that motives changed with aging, with increasing endorsement of pain relief motives, particularly pain relief without other motives.

In contrast, more recreational opioid misuse motives (e.g., to experiment, to get high) peaked in adolescents or young adults. Finally, non-pain relief motives in older adults (50 and older) were associated with higher rates of any past year substance use disorder and past year suicidal ideation.

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What Drugs Are Prescribed for Chronic Musculoskeletal Pain Relief?

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PainRelief.com Interview with:
Debbie Feldman,, Ph.D.
Professeure titulaire/Full Professor
Faculté de médecine/Faculty of Medicine
École de réadaptation/School of Rehabilitation
Université de Montréal

Debbie Feldman,, Ph.D. Professeure titulaire/Full Professor Faculté de médecine/Faculty of Medicine École de réadaptation/School of Rehabilitation Université de Montréal
Dr. Feldman

PainRelief.com:  What is the background for this study?  What are the main findings?

Response: The goal was to explore clinical management of new cases of musculoskeletal conditions associated with chronic pain, at the population level. Few studies to date have addressed treatment at the population level and none explored initial management specifically. Furthermore, not much is known regarding patient and provider characteristics that are potentially associated with different treatment options (except for some information regarding prescription of opioids). Main findings are in the answer below.

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