Anxiety between patient factors to more opioid use after surgery

Surgeons wielding their life-saving scalpels, laparoscopic tools, or other implements to repair & remove what ails their patients understand all too well that pain is an unavoidable part of the healing process. However, the current opioid crisis has rendered the standard by prescribing practices for these highly effective analgesics fraught with risk with surgery and critical care.

 There is not much ongoing research on which surgical patients require opioids, despite a push in the field for personalized medicine. Habitually with postoperative opioid prescribing, personalization falls by the wayside, with surgeons using the same amounts for every person receiving a certain process.

Why Pain Specialist would not prescribe an Opioid in 10 Years?

Scientists looked at the data for more than 1,000 people undergoing an elective hysterectomy, thoracic surgery, or a total knee or hip replacement. Before their procedures, each patient provided demographic information and filled out several screening questionnaires. They have been given scores measuring their degree of depression, fatigue, pain, anxiety, sleep disturbance, physical function, as well as the severity of their global and surgical site pain. The research team also measured how many pills were prescribed per patient. Each patient was then contacted one month following surgery to consider how many opioid pills they had consumed. They found that anxiety is linked with more opioid use, which is disheartening to see but also heartening in the sense that this is something we could potentially target. Other persistent factors linked to expanded opioid use included younger age, non-white race, no college degree, alcohol and tobacco use, and sleep disturbance.