opioid treatment •

Opioid abuse continues.

(Mirror Daily, United States) – The concern of opioid abuse is far from being over as the new regulations have proved to be quite ineffective in dealing with this problem.

It is already known that many people throughout the United States are addicted to opioids, and heroin is one of them. Until now, experts believed that opioid treatment should be only available on prescription. They thought that by doing this, they will solve the problem.

However, the issue on the streets remains as many drug dealers fool consumers by selling them powerful opioid drugs instead of heroin. Worse, it has been recently discovered that some opioids are much stronger and more addictive than heroin. In other words, they can quickly lead to an overdose.

There are many initiatives throughout the United States that try to tackle this problem. One of them is the new drug, naloxone, which is thought to deal with the side-effects of the opioid abuse. For instance, if a victim collapses from an overdose, this drug can be sprayed into the victim’s nostrils to remove the effect of the overdose.

However, even this drug is still not enough to deal with this issue. In addition to this, customers must follow the instructions correctly in order to use naloxone efficiently. Unfortunately, disabled people on Medicare were the least helped by the new laws.

After issuing 81 laws regarding the prescription of opioids, the problem is still not solved, according to a team of scientists from the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law.

According to Jill Horwitz, Ph.D., JD., these laws have been highly ineffective on disabled Medicare beneficiaries. The data was collected based on a study that included 2.2 million participants between ages of 21 to 64 years old.

Unfortunately, it was established that these beneficiaries had a higher rate of complicated medical conditions, poverty, and opioid use than the rest of the United States population. According to Professor Ellen Meara, Ph.D. and lead author from the Dartmouth Institute, these laws were not able to tackle the opioid epidemic regarding these patients.

The new laws were released between 2006 and 2012. However, other laws issued starting from 2012 proved to have more success in dealing with the opioid abuse throughout the United States. Hopefully, educating people will be another countermeasure that will prevent this epidemic from spreading further.

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Opioids are still causing addiction.

(Mirror Daily, United States) – The latest study has shown that many patients keep on taking strong prescription opioid painkillers several months after joint replacement surgery.

These statistics are concerning because joint replacement surgery has become more popular leading to a higher rate of opioid overdoses in the United States. Usual prescriptions of opioid painkillers are drugs like Percocet, Vicodin, and OxyContin.

Furthermore, the real death cause of music legend Prince was a strong synthetic opioid painkiller, known as fentanyl. According to some sources, the artist suffered severe hip pain because of intense acrobatics performed during his concerts over the years.

Some 574 patients undergoing hip or knee replacement surgery were observed during the study. Scientists established that around 30 percent of them were taking possibly addictive opioid painkillers before the surgery. Plus, among this group, 35 percent of hip patients and 53 percent of knee patients were still taking the drugs six months after the surgery.

Moreover, the researchers discovered that 4 percent of hip patients and 8 percent of knee patients were still taking the drugs six months after the joint replacement, despite the fact that they did not take opioids before the surgery.

According to these results, some patients continue to rely on opioids in spite of the improvements in their knee or hip pain. It means that the use of these drugs is based on addiction rather than reducing pain.

Plus, some patients who did not rely on opioids before having surgery will become addicted to them after receiving the joint replacement. Furthermore, Jenna Goesling, a researcher from the University of Michigan in Ann Harbor, underlined that the use of painkillers after joint replacement surgery has critically increased in the United States.

Scientists believe that everyone’s target should be to find a better way of helping patients after joint replacement surgeries and to encourage them to stop using opioids. Therefore, a pain management program should be developed to establish which type of medication would be ideal to replace the high use of opioids.

Still, further research is needed in order to determine how patients would react to other types of medication. All in all, addiction to opioids must be stopped. Hopefully, scientists and researchers will find a solution as soon as possible.

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