A multidisciplinary group of physicians, nurses, pharmacists and patients teamed up to provide guidelines on how many opioid painkillers should be prescribed following specific procedures.
The idea came about after Marty Makary, MD, a professor of surgery and health policy at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, realized he and his colleagues had varying ideas about what number of pills was appropriate. In short, they didn’t have a clue.
“We’re the experts, the heads of this and that, and we don’t know,” Makary recalled to Kaiser Health News.
The group believes its consensus guidelines are so pressing with the opioid epidemic and the pills’ strong addictive power that it went ahead and published the recommendations online instead of waiting months for a medical journal review process.
For coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) patients, the group recommended opioid painkillers be capped at 30, the most of any of the 20 procedures considered. Other procedures like arthroscopic knee surgery (20) and hysterectomy (15) were given lower ceilings, while the group recommended zero pills for cardiac catheterizations and cochlear implants.
Read more from Kaiser Health News below:
Daniel joined TriMed’s Chicago editorial team in 2017 as a Cardiovascular Business writer. He previously worked as a writer for daily newspapers in North Dakota and Indiana.