Countering Opioid Overdoses: A Public Health Intervention

The Opioid Overdose Problem

The opioid epidemic is a severe public health crisis that must be addressed with urgency in the United States. It has spread in large part due to care providers over-prescribing strong and addictive opioids for pain relief to patients, who in turn become long-term opioid addicts (Brummett et al., 2017). Illegal opioids are also reaching the streets from other sources, compounding the problem. However, since many healthcare providers are unable to control what happens outside their facilities—in terms of keeping drugs off the streets—they can still make a meaningful difference by intervening within their own institutions.

It is true that patients have a right to expect pain relief, but the short-sightedness of healthcare professionals who prescribe opioids without sufficient caution is often a major setback in the fight against opioid abuse. One solution is to reduce the strength of opioids prescribed to patients so that the goal becomes pain management—that is, helping patients tolerate pain—rather than total pain elimination. The goal should be to bring pain down to a level that the patient can endure, not to make it disappear entirely (Harbaugh et al., 2018). When opioids that are too strong are prescribed, patients can become addicted very easily, because the sensation of complete pain relief is itself highly addictive.

Other problems, such as sleep apnea and severe depression, can follow opioid use and cause patients to feel that more drugs are needed to counterbalance these new issues (Rowsell et al., 2016). This creates a negative cycle: patients feel poorly, doctors prescribe more drugs, patients feel worse, and even more drugs are given. Sooner or later, people end up overdosing on opioids—either ones prescribed to them or ones obtained illegally. The underlying cause of overdose is dependency; by that point, patients have become substance abusers.