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01-02-2019 | Opioid prescribing and pain management / commentary
Opioids and Ethics: Is Opioid-Free the Only Responsible Arthroplasty?
Published in: HSS Journal ® | Issue 1/2019
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Against the backdrop of the US opioid epidemic, clinicians, hospitals, lawmakers, and the public are very concerned about the role of opioids in pain management. Although the majority of today’s opioid overdose deaths involve heroin, illicit fentanyl, and polypharmacy [2], it is undeniable that reckless overprescribing helped fuel today’s crisis [5]. As a result, a common question is: how can we reduce opioid prescribing? Or in the language of Toward Opioid-Free Arthroplasty: A Leadership Forum, the June 2018 gathering that inspired this special issue of HSS Journal, which I attended (Fig. 1): how do we move toward “opioid-free” medicine—in this case, opioid-free arthroplasty?
Fig. 1
Travis Rieder, PhD, talks with other experts at the invitational symposium, Toward Opioid-Free Arthroplasty: A Leadership Forum, held at HSS in June 2018. “If no one knows whose job it is to protect patients from the risks of opioids,” writes Rieder, “those risks are much more likely to materialize.” Photograph by Robert Essel.
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