#pain #painkillers
"The risks of addiction and overdose make prescribing opioids not unlike sending someone home with a gun. More than two million people in the United States are believed to have an opioid-use disorder, and last year more than fifty thousand died from overdoses. The risk of addiction for any particular person can’t be confidently predicted, but studies show that some seven per cent of people who are prescribed opioids after an operation are still refilling their prescriptions three months later. Opioids are miserable in other ways: they leave users sleepy, confused, and constipated. But what else is there to give? 'The last twenty years have been quite depressing to be a pain researcher,' Todd Bertoch, an anesthesiologist who has overseen more than a hundred and fifty clinical trials, told me. 'Everybody was waiting for a magic non-opioid opioid—something that wasn’t an opioid, but behaved just like one.' Now, at last, there is something substantially new."
https://archive.ph/8ab40