Warning About the Dangers of Painkillers

The prevalence of the use of opioid-derived painkillers, which are legally prescribed by doctors, and the deaths resulting from their misuse have become a serious health and social issue in the United States. According to Reuters, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recently issued guidelines for doctors on how to reduce the prescription of strong painkillers. Tom Frieden, the director of the CDC, states that the excessive prescribing of opioids for chronic pain relief is the main factor behind the opioid overdose crisis in America. The sale of legal opioids has quadrupled in the United States since 1999. The death toll from opioid overdoses has exceeded 165,000 since that year, with more than forty people dying daily from overdoses in the country. One of the ways to prevent deaths from the misuse of these painkillers is the use of Naloxone, a medication that health officials are calling for increased access to for medical responders. General practitioners often prescribe medications that can be opioids for chronic pain lasting more than three months. The new guidelines issued for American doctors suggest using non-opioid medications such as acetaminophen (without codeine) or ibuprofen for chronic pain relief unless the patient has an incurable disease like advanced cancer. If prescribing opioid painkillers is unavoidable, doctors are required to prescribe the minimum necessary amount and the patient must be regularly monitored by a physician. Additionally, pain relief should be accompanied by non-pharmacological methods such as exercise. American doctors have been asked to avoid prescribing Xanax, Valium, and Lorazepam as much as possible, and if there is no alternative to prescribing them, the prescriptions should be for immediate use only and not for long-term periods. According to Reuters, in 2014, over two million Americans aged 12 and older misused prescription opioids and became dependent on them.