News & Blog

ICA staff attended the NIH Pathways to Prevention Workshop: The Role of Opioids in the Treatment of Chronic Pain in October. The final report of that workshop is now available. The findings and recommendations were explained in a telebriefing held last week, which was recorded and can be listened to at your convenience by following the instructions here.

The final report reflects comments from all sectors involved. In examining the evidence, the evaluators came to a few key conclusions:

1. Opioids are less effective for treating fibromyalgia than for other conditions.
2. Alternatives to opioid treatment are preferable for many chronic pain conditions.
3. Their needs to be a change in healthcare provider prescribing behaviors.
4. Those suffering from central pain syndromes (e.g. fibromyalgia) face greater risk of addiction, and opioids also don’t work well to treat such conditions. Therefore, the risks outweigh benefits.
5. The longer a pain syndrome persists (chronic), the more resistant to opioid treatment the pain becomes.
6. Large numbers of Americans are receiving suboptimal care.
7. At the root of the problem is the inadequate knowledge about the best approaches to treat various types of pain.

The full final report, including the collective recommendations of the writers, is now available on the NIH website.