Opioids are not necessarily evil – Michael Schatman

 

Since 1999 the use of opioids for pain management has quadrupled in the USA, resulting in what is now well known as the ‘opioid epidemic’ – too many people are now unnecessarily reliant on the drugs and opioid-related overdoses have rocketed. The prescription of opioids within the USA is now considered to be one of the biggest health crises facing the nation, however the battle to ‘fix’ the problem is complex.

Michael Schatman has worked in multidisciplinary chronic pain management for over 30 years and has published more than 90 journal articles on pain management and pain bioethics. He recently published an article discussing the ‘MEDD myth’, exploring the impact of reliance on unreliable techniques for calculating opioid doses within the medical literature and in the generation of opioid guidelines. We contacted Michael to find out more about this as well as his extensive work around the ongoing opioid epidemic in the USA.

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