Narrative Does Matter: Self-Guided Opioid Weaning

Perhaps it's obvious.  I write blog posts with regularity, I consume news voraciously, and I've never met a microphone I didn't enjoy speaking into.  But in the event it's not readily apparent, I'm happy to share that the single most important concept in contemporary communications is this: narrative.

"Narrative" is occasionally used as an epithet in political discourse (as in "you're just choosing facts that fit your narrative") and I'm as concerned as anyone else about the balkanization of modern media (which I describe as "choose your own narrative"), but the power of well-told stories to shape, change, or at least influence thinking is undeniable.  We live in a world of competing narratives and while the ability to identify such is critical, the ability to create such can be transformative.

Health Affairs understands this.  Whenever I get a new issue, I typically flip directly to my favorite section: "Narrative Matters."  Here, public health workers on the front lines share stories of what it means when platitudes turn into policy.  It's one thing to talk in the abstract about the CDC's Ebola response... it's quite another to listen to a doctor tell the story of running an Ebola clinic in Liberia.

This month's issue contains another in a long line of compelling stories, though this one hits close to home for those of us fighting to stem the tide of prescription drug misuse and abuse.  The story comes to us from Travis Rieder, a research scholar at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.  His journey, despite his role at Hopkins, doesn't have anything to do with his role in public health.  Travis likes to ride motorcycles... and his story begins with a horrific motorcycle accident.

I won't retell the story (you really should read it for yourself), but to summarize: Travis ended up deeply dependent on opioid painkillers.  Knowing he needed to stop taking them, he initiated his own weaning protocol (that was, in retrospect, far too aggressive - even thought it was suggested by one of his doctors).  He lived in agony for days, then weeks.  But he stuck to his plan.  At one point, it got so bad, he contemplated suicide.

Where were his doctors, you ask?  He found the medical profession to be some combination of afraid, inept, reluctant... perhaps all of the above... to assist in the weaning of his opioids.  And this was a motivated patient, asking to be weaned.  A highly educated, white collar academic who was begging for help... and got none.  "How could it be that my doctor's best tapering advice led to that experience?" Travis asks, "And how could it be that not one of my more than ten doctors could help?"  And think: this story found its way to Health Affairs because Travis is a known author in the field of bioethics.  How many non-bioethicists out there are suffering in this same opioid purgatory?

As my colleague Mark Pew has written about extensively, we've arrived at the hard work cleaning up the mess.  He even created a hashtag for it (#cleanupthemess), not because we're trying to score marketing points, but because we needed an organizing principle for the combined and coordinated effort its going to take to accomplish our collective goal.

Travis's story highlights the fact that the clean up may be harder than we imagine.

Michael
On Twitter @PRIUM1

When Opioids Almost Kill You, Chances Are You'll Get More Opioids

I really wanted the first post of 2016 to be positive, uplifting, inspiring... but a study I read over the break was so unnerving, I had to go and ruin "return to work" day, already a day that lives in infamy, with even more depressing news.

Researchers at Boston Medical Center used a national database of prescription information to assess the likelihood of continued opioid prescriptions after a non-fatal overdose.  They looked at prescription information from 3,000 patients who experienced a non-fatal overdose between 2000 and 2012.  These patients were all prescribed opioids for chronic, non-cancer pain. 

Think about this: These 3,000 patients have already overdosed on prescription opioids. They are lucky to be alive. Surely, their healthcare providers will find another way, another mechanism, another approach to managing their pain. The risk here isn't illness or infection or a change in blood pressure... it's death.  

The bad news:

• Over 90% of these patients continued to receive opioids after their non-fatal overdose event
• 50% of these continued to receive the prescriptions from the same doctor
• 7% of the original group experienced a second overdose
• Two years after the first overdose, those with continuing opioid prescriptions were twice as likely to experience a second overdose event compared to those who were no longer receiving opioids. 

Why is this is happening?  

First, our fragmented healthcare system doesn't make it easy for prescribing physicians to discover the clinical events experienced by their patients outside of their immediate purview.  And patients may not want to disclose an overdose event for fear of having their medications discontinued.  I get that.  And it makes we wonder whether PDMPs should also include the ability for inpatient settings to report both fatal and non-fatal overdose events to the database so doctors can see this information whether its reported by the patient or not.  Linking electronic health records to PDMP systems would be a good start down this path.    

The second phenomenon driving these sorry statistics is that doctors are not comfortable weaning opioid (and other) medications.  No one, least of all me, would ever suggest immediate cessation of opioid therapy in light of a non-fatal overdose.  That's clinically irresponsible and potentially dangerous for the patient.  But the necessary steps forward are complicated: If the patient is on multiple medications that require weaning, which should we weaned first?  What titration steps should be used?  Is medication-assisted-therapy (MAT) an option?  Should I refer the patient or try to handle this myself?  These are hard questions and the primary care community, by far the most frequent prescribers of opioids, is currently ill-equipped to handle them.

Welcome to 2016.  Once more unto the breach, dear friends.  

Michael 

On Twitter @PRIUM1