Introduction
The plague of the 21st century in the U.S.A. was not Ebola or AIDS but the epidemic of opioid addiction. The growing number of deaths of Americans were registered as a result of overdoses of painkillers, heroin, and fentanyl which remain a critical problem of the state and led to a national disaster. However, the government in cooperation with medical organizations attempts to develop evidence-based strategies to stop the crisis. Hence, this paper aims to review database materials related to the opioid crisis in the U.S. and the means of its reduction.
Literature Overview
The opioid crisis is an acute social problem that began to manifest itself in the mid-2010s and continues to this day. The epidemic of opioid addiction started around the mid-1990s when doctors in the United States faced increasing patient complaints of chronic pain (Lovecchio et al., 2019). Pharmaceutical companies took advantage of this almost immediately. They began to advertise opioid-based drugs by any means and convince doctors that it is safe to prescribe these drugs and that it has high efficiency.
Opioid drugs affect the receptors responsible for pain perception and block pain signals. As a rule, they are prescribed for severe pain after surgery or in treating serious diseases. Medical workers at that time were exhausted by many patients with chronic pain of various origins, so they listened to the calls of corporations and began prescribing such medications to patients to alleviate people’s suffering faster and easier. Thus, prescription drugs of the opioid group have become widespread in the United States (Mir et al., 2019). After becoming addicted to these drugs, people started switching to heroin. Therefore, this led to an increased number of deaths annually.
When a person has already formed an addiction, they often come to the doctor for a new prescription. The latter refuses to prescribe another course because they understand that a patient is being treated not for a remedy for pain but wants a drug. After that, one begins to look for other ways to get opioids, often switching to heroin or fentanyl (Mir et al., 2019). Hence, evidence-based practitioners started searching for ways to halt the crisis by introducing mitigating strategies.
One important national priority is implementing evidence-based solutions to combat the opioid crisis. According to Balbale et al. (2017), “in February 2016, President Obama proposed $1.1 billion in additional funding to reverse the epidemic through expanded access to treatment for opioid abuse” (p. 2669). The program outlined the importance of monitoring prescriptions, identifying evidence-based prevention programs, and reverse prescribing drugs to mitigate opioid misuse. Later, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) introduced guidelines related to the risks and benefits of opioid treatment and suggested alternative means of treating chronic pain. These steps put the grand beginning of fighting against the epidemic at a national level.
More specific opioid crisis-fighting strategies will be described in this paragraph. Bailable (2017) et al. claim that “gastrointestinal (GI) care is among an array of medical specialties with rising opioid use” (p.2670). Therefore, medical authorities decided to improve patient safety by increasing the level of documenting patients’ data and reducing the costs of pain relief drugs. In the study, patients were taught self-management skills which slightly reduced opioid misuse; however, it was not enough to eliminate pain. Hence, self-coping activities and increased documentation are just a few evidence-based tools that help fight the epidemic.
Formal patient education remains a powerful method to reduce opioid abuse. Lovecchio et al. (2019) noted that the number of individuals taught to manage pain using non-drug medications showed fewer addiction symptoms than those who used opioids. In addition, Mir et al. (2019) asserted that patients with better medical assistance are less prone to drug intake. It means that healthcare personnel should be informed about tracking one’s health condition to decide if the opioid therapy is to be continued or not.
Moreover, drug providers kept selling billions of pills annually, participating in the crisis spread. After this information became known to the public, multibillion-dollar lawsuits began to be filed against pharmaceutical companies and distributors. Therefore, it was suggested to control drug suppliers’ transactions to reduce the number of opioids in pharmacies and healthcare facilities (Lovecchio et al., 2019). Tracking their operations became possible; the authorities also imposed increased taxes on such drugs to make them produce and sell less (Mir et al., 2019). This strategy contributed to lowered accessibility to opioids and mitigated the consequences of the epidemic.
Conclusion
In summation, the scale and depth of the opioid crisis in the United States are not exaggerated. It refers to the rapid increase in the use of opioid medications in the state, leading to millions of deaths annually. Evidence-based practitioners aim to prevent the crisis by implementing several strategies. Primarily, they recommend healthcare organizations conduct educational programs to teach patients how to cope with pain. Moreover, they suggest improving documentation for tracing treatment plans. Finally, it is beneficial to advocate for fighting against opioid-associated risks and implement alternative medicaments.
References
Balbale, S. N., Trivedi, I., O’Dwyer, L. C., McHugh, M. C., Evans, C. T., Jordan, N., & Keefer, L. A. (2017). Strategies to identify and reduce opioid misuse among patients with gastrointestinal disorders: A systematic scoping review. Digestive Diseases and Sciences, 62(10), 2668–2685. Web.
Lovecchio, F., Premkumar, A., Stepan, J., & Albert, T. (2019). Fighting back: Institutional Strategies to combat the opioid epidemic: A systematic review. HSS Journal, 15(1), 66–71. Web.
Mir, H., Miller, A., Obremskey, W., Jahangir, A., & Hsu, J. (2019). Confronting the opioid crisis. The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, 101(23), e126. Web.