There is an important article in the New York Times of 5-11-2014 about a veteran with chronic pain and his struggle to find adequate treatment for that pain, A Soldier’s War On Pain. This patient, like many others with chronic pain, was not helped by chronic opioid therapy [This article may be unavailable to non-subscribers].
So, in this post I have included some resources on chronic pain management. The first is the one I find most helpful.
Assessment and Management of Chronic Pain, 2013, is a Health Care Guideline from the Institute for Clinical Systems.
Below are some current guidelines for opioid prescribtion for chronic non cancer pain.
Can Fam Physician. 2011 Nov;57(11):1257-66, e407-18.
Canadian guideline for safe and effective use of opioids for chronic noncancer pain: clinical summary for family physicians. Part 1: general population, abstract in PubMed, full text html, full text pdf.
Can Fam Physician. 2011 Nov;57(11):1269-76, e419-28.
Canadian guideline for safe and effective use of opioids for chronic noncancer pain: clinical summary for family physicians. Part 2: special populations; abstract in PubMed, full text html, full text pdf.
Pain Physician. 2012 Jul;15(3 Suppl):S1-65.
American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians (ASIPP) guidelines for responsible opioid prescribing in chronic non-cancer pain: Part I–evidence assessment,abstract in PubMed, [Full text html and full text pdf are not currently available (due to error message on ASIPP websitefull, 5-11-2014)].
Pain Physician. 2012 Jul;15(3 Suppl):S67-116.
American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians (ASIPP) guidelines for responsible opioid prescribing in chronic non-cancer pain: Part 2–guidance, abstract in PubMed, [Full text html and full text pdf are not currently available (due to error message on ASIPP websitefull, 5-11-2014)]
And finally, there is an assessment of the literature on reducing opioid prescription from the Cochrane Database (spoiler alert: little data is available):
Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2013 Sep 1;9:CD010323. doi: 10.1002/14651858.CD010323.pub2. Interventions for the reduction of prescribed opioid use in chronic non-cancer pain, abstract in PubMed.
