For All Their Risks, Opioids Had No Pain-Relieving Advantage In A Yearlong Study

[DamianTV]

http://www.latimes.com/science/scien...306-story.html

For years, doctors turned to opioid painkillers as a first-line treatment for chronic back pain and aches in the joints. Even as the dangers of addiction and overdoses became more clear, the drugs' pain-relieving benefits were still thought to justify their risks.

Now researchers have hard data that challenges this view.

In the first randomized clinical trial to make a head-to-head comparison between opioids and other kinds of pain medications, patients who took opioids fared no better over the long term than patients who used safer alternatives.

"There was no significant difference in pain-related function between the 2 groups over 12 months," researchers reported Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.

By some measures, the people using non-opioid drugs such as Tylenol, ibuprofen and lidocaine experienced more pain relief than people using medications like morphine, Vicodin and oxycodone — though the differences weren't large enough to be considered statistically significant. Patients in both groups saw similar improvements in their quality of life.

The findings cast doubt on the medical community's "standard approach" of using opioids to manage chronic musculoskeletal pain, the researchers found.

"Overall, opioids did not demonstrate any advantage over nonopioid medications that could potentially outweigh their greater risk of harms," wrote the team led by Dr. Erin Krebs of the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Health Care System's Center for Chronic Disease Outcomes Research.

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Full article at link.

[Intoxiklown]

http://www.latimes.com/science/scien...306-story.html

The fact they said in the article people are dying from OD'ing on hydrocodone should be enough to raise a lot of eyebrows.

I take issue with these studies and the politicians who love them as they go on and on about the "opioid crisis", rattle off some figures relating to overdoses, and never mention the the fact we all know....the vast majority of those overdoses involve other drugs than just opioids, mainly things like Xanax. And I firmly believe it's because the talking point of, "People are addicted to opiates and it's killing them" sells a lot easier than "People are abusing their psych meds with other medications and it's killing them". Basically, it's easier to use the opiate addict route than to basically attack the psychological pharmaceutical industry because I know way more people taking xanax and other SSRI drug than I do narcotic painkillers.

That and the fact they used the pain scale (tell me with 1 being lowest and 10 highest how bad your pain is) isn't exactly reliable. Ask anyone who is a nurse, Nurse Practitioner, Physician's Assistant, MD, or a DO and they'll all have 100 stories of people wanting pain meds. When asked their pain level, the answer is "It's a 10".....while they are laid back texting and eating a bag of potato chips. I've experienced only once in my life what I called a "10 pain", and there was confusion with some of the staff when they came in expecting to see pain related to back and nerve damage but seeing my vitals with blood pressure around 250/140....so then they are thinking either someone wrote the wrong information or they were in the wrong room....because I was obviously having a heart attack and needed cardiology immediately (when in fact I was experiencing a true level 10 pain) . For context, I had a kidney stone get stuck between my kidney and bladder once (It had left my kidney that morning with my morning pee, but was too large to enter my bladder. So it became stuck and had closed off my ureter, which was both agonizing and would have required surgery had I not "forced" it through in a dillaudid fueled haze of desperation), and when asked my pain level for that I said through grit teeth, "About 6". Long story short, people either abuse or just embellish that scale.

There are going to be a lot of people winding up suffering and labeled dope heads because that's easier for our society to agree to than admitting people are abusing their meds and taking them with drugs like xanax that turn them lethal.