Six years ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued guidelines that discouraged doctors from prescribing opioids for pain and encouraged legislators to restrict the medical use of such drugs. Those guidelines, which had a disastrous impact on pain patients, were based on the assumption that overprescribing was responsible for rising drug-related deaths. But according to a new Frontiers in Pain Research study, that assumption is no longer true, if it ever was.
To support its theory that opioid prescriptions were driving drug-related deaths, independent researcher Larry Aubry and statistician B. Thomas Carr note, the CDC cited numbers that were already out of date. More recent data do not support the premise underlying the agency's pernicious advice. The CDC nevertheless included the same outdated analysis in the revised pain treatment guidelines that it published last February, which aim to ameliorate the damage done by the original version.
