Rep. Brenda Landwehr: Current CDC guideline on opioids limits choices and care
When a crisis grows to the scale of the opioid epidemic plaguing the United States, it becomes obvious that urgent reform is necessary.
Overdose deaths have been skyrocketing at the national level, reaching a new record of 71,000 in 2019, according to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And those grim numbers were only at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S., which has since seen indicators that drug overdose rates are rapidly accelerating.
The current Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain by the CDC keeps in place a system that creates unnecessary risks and limits individualized care between doctors and their patients.
The guideline encourages clinicians to prescribe a Schedule II long-acting opioid for initial chronic pain intervention in lieu of encouraging Schedule III alternatives. While policymakers intended for the guideline to bolster communication and care between doctors and patients, it has failed to accomplish anything of the sort.
It should not take long to realize that a change is absolutely the right course of action to ensure patients receive the best care possible. Implementing recommendations, like those made in the Department of Health and Human Services’ May 2019 Pain Management Best Practices Inter-Agency Task Force Report, would assist health care providers in better executing pain management and delivering pain management therapies.
Our Kansas communities are far too often isolated from alternative health care choices. Keeping policies in place that only serve to further that isolation is backwards and binds doctors’ hands while inflicting untold damage on patients and communities.
Kansans need immediate relief from a crisis as big as this, which is only being exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic and the economic fallout. As more and more people are facing job and housing insecurity, it makes sense to steer policy in the right direction that empowers patients and keeps them safe.
The longer the current guideline stays in place, in which choices are limited and patients cannot receive the best possible health care, the result will be more damage and anguish. It is past time to start putting into action better policy that actually helps and benefits patients suffering from chronic pain in Kansas and beyond.
The CDC should do the right thing and change the current guideline to reflect a more holistic and choice-oriented system of care for chronic pain management.