“When he was at 120 M.M.E.,” said Dr. Brooklyn, “he was in such severe pain that he was buying opioids on the street. He barely ate, lost 40 pounds, couldn’t pay rent and then turned to cheap heroin. His doctor continued to reduce his dose and, at 30 M.M.E., the patient called our program.”
Dr. Brooklyn put the patient on methadone, a type of opioid approved to treat addiction as well as to manage chronic pain. “It was like watering a dehydrated plant,” he said.
Dr. Joanna L. Starrels, an associate professor of medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and one of the experts who helped draft the C.D.C. guidelines, said chronic pain patients are an especially fragile group. “Some with severe persistent pain are barely getting by,” she said. “They are sometimes homebound, unable to work or fully participate in most of the rewarding aspects of life.” Their rates of depression are high, she said, and they have few reliable treatment alternatives.
Research that looks at the effect of dose reduction on such patients is in its infancy, she said.
In fact the guidelines include a plea for research to evaluate their efficacy.
That the guidelines have had widespread impact is not in question. While a handful of hospital systems and states had adopted opioid prescription limits before 2016, the number of institutions have since shot up.
In its annual survey of hospital-based pharmacies last year, the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists asked about opioid monitoring for the first time. In preliminary results, 41 percent said they had done so and some cited the C.D.C. guidelines.
By the end of 2016, seven states had passed legislation limiting opioid prescriptions; by October 2018, 33 states had enacted laws with some type of limit, guidance or requirement related to opioids, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
