Most surgeons say that when they started practicing medicine, there was little or no information about just how many pain pills that patients needed after specific procedures.
But questions remained: Would anyone pay attention to the guidelines and would smaller amounts be sufficient to control patients’ pain?
Seven months after specific guidelines for certain operations were issued in October 2017, surgeons reduced by nearly one-third the number of pills they prescribed, with no reported drop in patient satisfaction or increase in reported pain, according to the research.
“We’re not trying to deny patients narcotics,” said Dr. Joceline Vu, one of the paper’s authors and a general surgery resident at the University of Michigan. “But there’s an acceptable level where people are still happy and still have their pain under control, but we have dropped the number to a minimum.”
Overall, doctors prescribed eight fewer pills per patient—to 18 from 26—across nine common surgical procedures, including hernia repair, appendectomy, and hysterectomy, based on guidelines from the Michigan Opioid Prescribing Engagement Network (Michigan OPEN), a collaboration of hospitals, doctors, and insurers.
Patients also reported taking fewer pills, dropping to nine from 12 on average across those procedures, possibly because they were prescribed fewer in the first place.
Still, while researchers say the study offers a considerable reason for encouragement, it illustrates how difficult it is to change prescribing habits. In May 2018, at the study’s conclusion, the average number of pills prescribed exceeded the most up-to-date recommendations for all nine procedures.
And that’s in Michigan, where there has been a concerted push to change prescribing habits. Most states don’t have such a broad ongoing effort.
“There is a misconception that this is all fixed,” said Dr. Chad Brummett, co-director of Michigan OPEN and one of the researchers in the study. “I do think people are still overprescribing. Definitely.”
The guidelines come amid concern about the opioid crisis and a continued examination of the role that prescription drugs played in its escalation.
The likelihood of persistent opioid use rises with the number of pills and the length of time opioids are taken during recuperation from surgery. But there’s another avenue of concern. When doctors write scripts with a generous number of pills, the chance that patients won’t take them all increases, along with the potential for the unused pills to make their way from medicine cabinets to the street, or to fall into the hands of other family members.
“That can be a bigger concern for many of us,” said Vu. “It seems that in surgery, for whatever reason, we wrote prescriptions for a lot more opioids than people actually needed.”
The Michigan OPEN guidelines recommended amounts based on how much pain medication patients actually took the following surgery.
Other institutions developed their own surgery-specific prescribing principles, including Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore and the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Although they use different methods to determine the number of pills, most ended up with similar parameters, often in the range of zero to 20 pills, depending on the procedure.
All the prescribing directives apply to patients with acute pain, such as those who had surgery, not people with chronic pain, Vu and other researchers emphasized. Even so, chronic-pain patients argue that the focus on setting postsurgical prescribing levels has made it far more difficult for them to get treatment.
“These patients feel besieged ... and say, ‘I need these pills to get out of bed in the morning’,” said Vu. “This project and study are not about chronic pain. It’s about preventing harm to healthy people coming in for surgery.”
What are some of the guidelines? Michigan, in its initial recommendation, called for no more than 10 pills, equivalent to 5 milligrams of oxycodone, for a minor hernia repair, and no more than 20 for a minimally invasive hysterectomy.
The resulting changes offer important context.
Before the guidelines, for instance, patients with minor hernia repair operations were being prescribed 29 pills, according to the study. That fell to 14 by May 2018, which is still four more pills than the guidelines suggest.
An analysis of national Medicare data by Kaiser Health News and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, for example, found only a small drop—one to two pills on average, per patient—in postsurgical prescribing across seven different procedures from 2016 to 2017.
In July, when 2017 Medicare data became available, KHN and Hopkins did an additional analysis, which showed, on average, small decreases in the number of pills taken home from the pharmacy by patients in the first week after leaving the hospital. But the drop was smaller than the reductions seen in Michigan.
For example, nationwide prescribing following bypass surgery averaged 45 pills, a drop of three; after a hysterectomy, the drop was four pills from the six-year average to 30; and lumpectomy patients took home five fewer pills, for an average of 23.
“Those reductions are not sufficient,” said Dr. Marty Makary, the surgeon who spearheaded the development of guidelines at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School and whose staff helped perform the Medicare analysis for KHN. “The data represents prescriptions as recent as a year and a half ago, and we’re three years into the opioid crisis. We’re talking about mopping up the floor while the spigot is still on.”
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