Doctors are prescribing opioids to patients for chronic pain which has led patients to misuse and become addicted, causing a severe epidemic with this growing society. Costing both governmental and private health insurers estimated billions of dollars annually, opioid abuse has been known to cause insurance costs to increase due to liability claims and government agencies assisting with social services. State monitoring program systems have urged prescribing physicians to use proper precautions to check their databases prior to prescribing painkillers.
There have been guidelines which have been put in place to monitor all types of opioids and dosages being prescribed by physicians for patients making them aware of the consequences if these guidelines are not followed. Aside from doctors overprescribing painkillers, there are concerns of the
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With this situation becoming a spreading epidemic, it turns out this guideline was not being followed correctly or was disregarded by doctors. It was until a year ago that actions were taken to make is a law. With this law being established through the State Legislature, some pharmaceutical companies who had connections had tried to put a stop to this law. There was a possibility of this causing problems to patient access to care. One hopes that this new law will in a way help control this situation from becoming a massive pandemonium. Prior to the outbreak of abusing opioids, there had been other methods of dealing with chronic pain such as therapy, exercise and medications that were not a controlled substance; Naproxen, Ibuprofen and Aleve. Today how things shifted from that method to the prescribing pain medications left and right not realizing what outcomes would be or the process of getting their patients off painkillers along with the