NYK Patient Article Review Month 2014

• Featured Article:
  Prescription Painkillers' Overuse Has Become Silent Epidemic - US Warns
• Now You Know Internet Educational Services

What Are Your Patients Reading?

Now You Know understands that good quality educational material translates into excited patients who make more referrals. For this reason we go the extra mile to put together the latest and most credible articles on chiropractic and health. The sample article below is just one of the six articles from this month's Now You Know Real-News Email Newsletter that was sent to over a quarter of a million chiropractic patients. We offer this single article to the profession as a sample of what your patients could be reading. Click here to see how your patients could be getting the NYK Real-News Email Newsletter from you.

Featured Article:

The headline above is from a January 16, 2015, article in the U.S. edition of the British news publication The Guardian. The article is based on a position paper released on January 13, 2015, titled, "National Institutes of Health Pathways to Prevention Workshop: The Role of Opioids in the Treatment of Chronic Pain."

The Guardian article begins by reporting that in 2012, Americans received nearly 260 million prescriptions for opiate painkillers.  This high number stands in contrast to the  National Institutes of Health (NIH) statement that there is "scant" research supporting the use of these drugs for chronic pain. The NIH paper is based on the work of a seven member panel of experts who studied the use of opioids in medicine. "Chronic pain affects an estimated 100 million Americans, or one-third of the U.S. population."

One of the key factors  the panel found was that there were no studies comparing the use of opioid therapy or no opioid therapy versus placebo for evaluating long-term outcomes related to pain, function, or quality of life.  "Unfortunately, a lot of these drugs are approved on the basis of short-term trials," stated Roger Chou, MD, associate professor, medicine, Division of General Internal Medicine and Geriatrics, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, in an interview he gave to Medscape News.

In the paper summary, the panel states, "The rise in the number of Americans with chronic pain and the concurrent increase in the use of opioids to treat this pain have created a situation where large numbers of Americans are receiving suboptimal care." They continue, "At the root of the problem is the inadequate knowledge about the best approaches to treat various types of pain, balancing the effectiveness with the potential for harm, as well as a dysfunctional health care delivery system that encourages clinicians to prescribe the easiest rather than the best approach for addressing pain."

Perhaps the most disturbing comment from the paper speaks to the daily experience of a patient who is visiting a doctor for chronic pain.  The panel notes, "Particularly striking to the panel was the realization that evidence is insufficient for every clinical decision that a provider needs to make about the use of opioids for chronic pain, leaving the provider to rely on his or her own clinical experience."

An article titled, "Mandatory Use of Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs" in the January 26, 2015, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) looked at the problem. It reported that, "The rate of fatal prescription drug overdoses involving opioids almost quadrupled from 1.4 deaths/100,000 people in 1999 to 5.4 deaths/100,000 people in 2011."

"Chiropractic represents a drugless approach to health," notes Dr. Michael McLean, president of the International Chiropractors Association. "The problem is not just the use of these dangerous and powerful drugs, the problem is a culture that looks to eliminating the symptoms rather that searching for the underlying cause of pain and other health issues."

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