Pain Medicine

Biography

Biography: Rose Berkun

Abstract

Addiction is a chronic disease, just like hypertension and diabetes. Since 1999, the rate of overdose deaths involving opioids (including prescription opioid pain relievers and heroin) nearly quadrupled. 78 Americans die every day from an opioid overdose. Deaths from prescription opioids-drugs like oxycodone, hydrocodone, and methadone—have also quadrupled since 1999 and now account for the number one cause of accidental death, surpassing motor vehicle accidents. In 1996, the American Pain Society (APS) introduced the phrase “pain as the 5th vital sign". In 2001, the Joint Commission rolled out its Pain Management Standards, which helped grow the idea of pain as a "fifth vital sign." It required healthcare providers to ask every patient about their pain, given the perception at the time was that pain was undertreated. On December 12, 1995, the Food and Drug Administration approved the opioid analgesic OxyContin. It was advertized as a safer, less addictive opiate analgesic because of its longer half life. It hit the market in 1996. In its first year, OxyContin accounted for $45 million in sales reaching $3.1 billion by 2010. Since that time, the U.S. has experienced a surge in opioid prescriptions -- and, subsequently, an increase in overdoses and deaths tied to these painkillers. Because of this crisis and a shortage of addiction specialists, ABMS approved a new Addiction Medicine multi-specialty subspecialty for Preventive Medicine and a certificate exam open to 24 medical specialties. American Medical Association vowed to advocate for a removal of "pain as the fifth vital sign" from all patient assessments and surveys. States are working at local levels to help physicians treat opioid addicted patients in their own practices.