Many healthcare providers have misapplied the CDC's 2016 guidelines on opioid prescribing, the guidelines' authors wrote in a paper for The New England Journal of Medicine.
The authors are:
- Deborah Dowell, MD, senior medical adviser/CMO of the CDC's division of unintentional injury prevention
- Tamara Haegerich, PhD, deputy associate director for science in the CDC's division of unintentional injury prevention
- Roger Chou, MD, a professor of medicine at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland
The CDC introduced the guidelines in 2016 to give primary care physicians recommendations for treating chronic pain. However, many clinicians have wrongly imposed the guidelines, often cutting patients off from pain medications who should've been taking them, the authors wrote.
They noted the guidelines should not be used to justify "hard limits and abrupt tapering of drug doses."
To view the full paper, click here.