Drug overdose, driven largely by overdose related to the use of opioids, is now the leading cause of unintentional injury death in the United States. The ongoing opioid crisis lies at the intersection of two public health challenges: reducing the burden of suffering from pain and containing the rising toll of the harms that can arise from the use of opioid medications. Chronic pain and opioid use disorder both represent complex human conditions affecting millions of Americans and causing untold disability and loss of function. In the context of the growing opioid problem, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched an Opioids Action Plan in early 2016. As part of this plan, the FDA asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to convene a committee to update the state of the science on pain research, care, and education and to identify actions the FDA and others can take to respond to the opioid epidemic, with a particular focus on informing FDA's development of a formal method for incorporating individual and societal considerations into its risk-benefit framework for opioid approval and monitoring.

The opioid overdose epidemic combined with the need to reduce the burden of acute pain poses a public health challenge. To address how evidence-based clinical practice guidelines for prescribing opioids for acute pain might help meet this challenge, Framing Opioid Prescribing Guidelines for Acute Pain: Developing the Evidence develops a framework to evaluate existing clinical practice guidelines for prescribing opioids for acute pain indications, recommends indications for which new evidence-based guidelines should be developed, and recommends a future research agenda to inform and enable specialty organizations to develop and disseminate evidence-based clinical practice guidelines for prescribing opioids to treat acute pain indications. The recommendations of this study will assist professional societies, health care organizations, and local, state, and national agencies to develop clinical practice guidelines for opioid prescribing for acute pain. Such a framework could inform the development of opioid prescribing guidelines and ensure systematic and standardized methods for evaluating evidence, translating knowledge, and formulating recommendations for practice.

The opioid crisis in the United States has come about because of excessive use of these drugs for both legal and illicit purposes and unprecedented levels of consequent opioid use disorder (OUD). More than 2 million people in the United States are estimated to have OUD, which is caused by prolonged use of prescription opioids, heroin, or other illicit opioids. OUD is a life-threatening condition associated with a 20-fold greater risk of early death due to overdose, infectious diseases, trauma, and suicide. Mortality related to OUD continues to escalate as this public health crisis gathers momentum across the country, with opioid overdoses killing more than 47,000 people in 2017 in the United States. Efforts to date have made no real headway in stemming this crisis, in large part because tools that already existâ€"like evidence-based medicationsâ€"are not being deployed to maximum impact. To support the dissemination of accurate patient-focused information about treatments for addiction, and to help provide scientific solutions to the current opioid crisis, this report studies the evidence base on medication assisted treatment (MAT) for OUD. It examines available evidence on the range of parameters and circumstances in which MAT can be effectively delivered and identifies additional research needed.

VA opioid prescription policy, practice, and procedures : hearing before the Committee on Veterans' Affairs, United States Senate, One Hundred Fourteenth Congress, first session, March 26, 2015.

The Federal Guidelines for Opioid Treatment Programs (Guidelines) describe the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's (SAMHSA) expectation of how the federal opioid treatment standards found in Title 42 of the Code of Federal Regulations Part 8 (42 CFR § 8) are to be satisfied by opioid treatment programs (OTPs). Under these federal regulations, OTPs are required to have current valid accreditation status, SAMHSA certification, and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) registration before they are able to administer or dispense opioid drugs for the treatment of opioid addiction.

This book has been written for the general health care professional, from every medical and paramedical specialization. Because pain is the most common factor driving patients to seek professional advice, it is likely that every physician, psychologist, and therapist has been clinically exposed to the difficulty and the frequent frustration of dealing with people in pain. All of them may find in this book some explanations for their puzzles and some updated information, which usually are published in specialized journals not ordinarily read by the general practitioner. Actually the book has been addressed to professionals at two different levels of general practice. At one level is the busy practitioner who treats most patients with' 'acute" pain, and who may use this information in daily practice to prevent the onset of chronic pain; a common effort from all professionals currently is needed to curb the "epidemic" of chronic pain in the United States. At another level the book has been addressed to the practitioner who may have a more intense desire to become involved in the actual management of chronic pain patients.