by Judy George: For Complete Post, Click Here…
Hard thresholds for pain medication doses, duration no longer promoted.
New draft guidelines for primary care and other clinicians proposed by the CDC Thursday no longer promote hard thresholds on opioid prescribing.
The draft guidance for acute, subacute, and chronic pain is part of a proposed update to the controversial 2016 CDC opioid guideline for chronic pain. The 2016 guideline was interpreted as setting medication dose and duration limits and was misapplied by some organizations, leading CDC researchers to attempt to clarify the document in 2019.
The new guideline isn’t designed to replace clinical judgment, but is a tool to help providers and patients make safe, effective pain care decisions and provides “voluntary recommendations on the use of opioids to treat pain,” the CDC noted.
It is not intended to be applied as an inflexible standard, the agency added. It’s also not intended to lead to rapid opioid tapering or discontinuation, and does not apply to sickle cell disease-related pain, cancer pain, and palliative or end-of-life care.
“I was very pleased to see clear language that the proposed guideline is not a replacement for clinical judgment or individualized, person-centered care,” noted pain specialist Beth Darnall, PhD, of Stanford University School of Medicine.
“This is crucial, as misapplications of the 2016 guideline centered around a reductive focus on dose-based limits and tapering that was associated with patient harms,” Darnall told MedPage Today.
Michigan Voices for Better Health 