Collaborative Pain Care to Improve Outcomes

The largest and most expensive health condition is chronic pain affecting over 100M Americans - larger and more expensive than cancer, diabetes, and heart disease combined.  The dramatic increase in chronic pain has resulted in increased pain medication usage, and a commensurate increase in people addicted to them.  Opioid use disorder (OUD) and chronic pain are dueling epidemics. Policy makers have made it worse – either harming patients by denying them life-saving medications or exposing patients prone to abuse to life-threatening drugs. The result has been greater mortality rates, legal ramifications for clinicians and rising costs.  Now 10% of all suicides are due to chronic pain patients not getting the treatment they need. Pain patients are stigmatized and blamed for their conditions, rather than given the appropriate sympathy and care they need.

Opioid overdose is the leading cause of adult injury death and teenager death in America. Three times as many people are addicted to and die from opioids than all illegal drugs combined.  Like the foolish policies of governments which created the over-utilization of pain medications, everything that the government has done to influence the opioid abuse crisis has just made things worse, as addicts move from prescription opioids to illegal opioids. According to the CDC in November 2021, there has been a 30% increase in drug overdoses in the last 12 months  - exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and associated isolation, loneliness, job loss, and economic stresses. There is 60% overlap between mental health and addiction, and according to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, 50% of substance abuse is due to genetic factors.