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Americans suffering from chronic pain "beg" health regulators to restore their access to opioid badgesics as part of the broader federal crackdown.
Patients flocked to the Food and Drug Administration headquarters Monday to better care for people with chronic pain. They argue that recent measures to combat opioid abuse are deterring health professionals, making access to essential prescription opioids more and more difficult. to care, reports NBC News
. guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in response to the increase in overdose mortality rates, which tells providers to significantly limit the number of opioid prescriptions they write, and encourages patients to exhaust all alternatives before turning to badgesics. (RELATED: How a painkiller ignited the addiction epidemic)
"I have not yet had a doctor who accepts me as a patient", Sandra Flores, an emergency room nurse who suffers from a condition that ignites membranes that protect her brain and spine, told NBC News. "No doctor will fight, they just do not want to get in trouble They have forgotten the people for whom these drugs were made When can I get some medicine to be comfortable in my body ? "
Patients with daily pain say that the CDC guidelines, as well as the prescribers 'and prescribers' lawsuits, leave them with little access to drugs – desperately needed to function. also pointed out that the majority of possible alternatives to opioid badgesics are not covered by insurance.
Patients testifying stressed the seriousness of the situation for people suffering from chronic pain, one of them d & # 39; Between them saying that "suicide is always an option for us."
"At the FDA – we beg you. Fix the blatant mistakes of the CDC, "said Rose Bigham, with the Alliance for the Treatment of Pain Intractable, according to NBC News. "The CDC's recommendations have caused irreparable harm to people who are suffering."
FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb says the agency is trying to balance the need to combat opioid addiction with the appropriate badgesic treatment. Opioid-related deaths are increasingly linked to illicit drugs such as heroin and fentanyl, but prescription opioids still account for more than 40% of opioid-related deaths in 2016, killing about 46 people each day.
"We do not want to perpetuate the practices that led to the misuse of these drugs, and the addiction crisis," Gottlieb said, according to NBC News. "At the same time, we do not want to act in a poorly targeted way and end up disadvantaging legitimate patients, and in most cases, opioids should only be used for the treatment of acute pain and prescribed for short periods of time."
Overdose deaths increased by 21% in 2016, making more than 64,000 deaths according to the CDC.The increase is mainly attributable to opioids, which made 42,249 deaths in 2016, an increase of 28% compared to the estimated 33,000 lives lost in 2015.
Death of synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, an badgesic 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, experienced a particularly dramatic increase, more than doubling from 9,580 lives in 2015 to 19,413 in 2016.
The epidemic is contributing to the decline in life expectancy in the United States, according to authorities.The life expectancy has dropped for the second year in a row in 2016 for the first time since an influenza outbreak in 1962 and 1963.
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