Pain – Opioid Addiction

Transcript

What are some of the problems that we run into? Well, certainly the one that’s making the papers is addiction. A fairly large number of people are susceptible to becoming addicted to opioids when their body is exposed to them because that’s how they’ve been treated. And the addiction can be very hard to fight. And even after the pain problem has gone away, which hopefully it has, even then, the patient may still be driven by a feeling of need and craving to use these medications, and it can become a very destructive addiction. The end result for some patients with addiction is overdose. And sometimes overdose happens even when there’s no addiction. It’s just because the patient took too much medicine in an effort to treat their pain, even when no addiction is present. So overdose with opioids is often fatal. It leads to the brain losing its drive for breathing. And patients basically die from lack of breathing because of an overdose on these medications, these opioids. And we’re seeing, unfortunately, that this is a huge epidemic in this country