Thursday, August 7, 2014

A Defense of New Opioid Guidelines

[Another guest post from Dr. Pamella Thomas, PRIUM's Medical Director.  Recently, another physician challenged both the science behind ACOEM's 50 mg MED threshold as well as its applicability to chronic pain cases. This was the response from Dr. Thomas.]

Dr. ----

Hope all is well.

I am a bit surprised that you would challenge the 50 mg morphine equivalent dose (MED) threshold supported in the updated ACOEM guidelines.  We are in a CDC-declared opioid epidemic.  People are dying needlessly.  It is difficult to dissent against ACOEM’s 50 MED threshold when the reported death rate is 3 to 5 times greater in patients prescribed 50 mg MEDs and above than in patients prescribed 49 mg MEDs and below.  For context the current CDC VitalSign report shows that, nationally, 46 opioid overdose deaths occur each day.

Furthermore the ACOEM guidelines are – contrary to your suggestion – both applicable to and directed toward chronic cases.  As the most recently updated standards for the practice of occupational medicine, ACOEM further reveals our developing understanding of opioid best-practices.  There is simply no credible evidence to support long term opioid use for chronic non-cancer pain.  Conversely a Cochrane review demonstrated that back pain patients taking opioids for more than a week, when compared with a similar cohort taking opioids for a week or less, were twice as likely not to return to work within a year.  A related review contradicted the practice of escalating doses.  High doses of opioids were shown to be no more effective than lower doses of opioids, supporting the intuitive notion that once opioid receptors are saturated, increasing the dose does not yield additionally beneficial results.  If you have not yet read the two studies used to confirm the new ACOEM morphine equivalent dose (MED) level, you should.

Another concerning issue that pain management physicians among others are not taking into account?  Up to 30% of patients can’t properly metabolize approximately 25% of drugs currently used clinically due to inherent pharmacogenetic deficiencies (Wang et al., 2009).  Drugs in this grouping include codeine, tramadol, oxycodone, hydrocodone and many synthetic and semisynthetic opioids which are not adequately metabolized by other CYP450 isoenzymes.  As result many patients are building up levels of the parent drug causing cascading effects such as hyperalgesia, which in turn often causes the treating physician to further increase dosage.  Dose escalation is often pursued instead of weaning without documenting either improved function or reduced pain.

Following a psychosocial evaluation, most patients feel better once weaning starts in conjunction with pain management and mind-body therapies (e.g. cognitive behavioral therapy, motivational interviewing, etc.).  However, only about 4-7% of patients are ever evaluated for these potential treatment options despite prolonged treatment and a history of attenuated improvement.  Similarly medically indicated evaluations for dependence and addiction or interventions for smoking cessation are often left unaddressed.

My feeling is that a number of clinicians still practice based on an outdated biomedical model instead of utilizing a growing body of evidence supporting a psychosocial model of pain and its correlation to impairment and disability.  It is ignored that psychologically and/or socially distressed people seek medical treatment for psychosocial conditions.  Due to this lack of recognition, many psychosocial conditions are being managed through inappropriate modalities and passed off as anatomically  diagnosed biomedical pain.  These inappropriate modalities (e.g. opioids, surgery, and interventional treatment) share complicit complications and side effects that further exacerbate long term disability and failed syndromes.

Consider that in October 2010, the CDC published a report indicating that over 60% of US children had suffered some form of traumatic abuse prior to the age of 18.  These same children grow up and enter the work force.  Some of them eventually file claims because of unresolved, unaddressed issues amplified by a work related injury, leaving the worker feeling victimized by a supervisor, a poor work environment, or low wages.  Injecting opioid treatment into this psychosocial complexity without addressing the underlying issues leads to long term disability and frequent social isolation due to unsympathetic family, friends, and coworkers.

I hope that this will help clarify why the decision was made that, when people are dying daily, we cannot apologize for taking action to ensure patient safety.  While we realize guidelines take time to be updated (MTUS is being rewritten currently), an epidemic exists at this moment which can be controlled by removing the cause.

We do not want to be downstream catching bodies but upstream saving lives.
Thank you for your understanding.


Dr. Thomas
On Twitter @PRIUM1

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