Ruth Potee, M.D., of Greenfield, Mass., said that when buprenorphine first became available in 2002, there was an expectation that it would be widely used in primary care because addiction is a chronic condition. “By 2010, only 2 percent of primary care physicians were prescribing it,” she said. “That was a massive failure.” Dr. David…
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Other news from bridge therapeutics
“A great part of the tragedy of this opioid crisis is that, unlike in previous such crises America has seen, we now possess effective treatment strategies that could address it and save lives,” Nora Volkow, MD, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, wrote in an editorial accompanying the study (Ann Intern Med 2018…
In this article the Washington Examiner discusses how buprenorphine/naloxone combination should be readily available and could act as a key defense against the on going opioid problem in the U.S. Key to understanding how buprenorphine helps is an understanding of the difference between physical dependence and addiction. This can be a confusing distinction, as the…
In this article “Primary Care and the Opioid-Overdose Crisis — Buprenorphine Myths and Realities,” Sarah Wakeman, MD, medical director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Substance Use Disorders Initiative and Michael Barnett, MD, of the Department of Health Policy and Management, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, discuss how “to have any hope of stemming…
In this article by PBS explains how traditional opioids interact with the receptors in the brain to produce analgesia (pain relief), constipation, depression, and euphoria. Cathy Cahill PhD, a pain researcher at UCLA also explains how those with chronic pain taking traditional opioids experience big swings of emotion due to the euphoria and subsequent dysphoria…
America’s opioid epidemic is exacting a massive human toll that also is impacting the economy, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said Tuesday. “From an economic standpoint, some high percentage of prime-age people who are not in the labor force, particularly prime-age males who are not in the labor force, are taking painkillers of some kind,”…
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently announced a new set of research priorities around addiction and pain research in efforts to combat the nation’s opioid crisis. The HEAL (Helping to End Addiction Long-term) Initiative was launched by the NIH with support from the president and the Department of Health and Human Services. Under this…
Aiming for an “overall reduction in opioid overuse and overdoses,” Medicare announces starting next year there will be new limits for high-dose opioid prescriptions. The Medicare announcement—part of the 2019 Medicare Advantage and Part D Rate Announcement and Call Letter— sets limits for opioid-naive patients on seven-day prescriptions, and notes the expansion and combination of the…
A recent article published on the website The Hill discusses the problem of prescribing addictive schedule III drugs for pain relief rather than the equally effective and non-addictive schedule II drugs.