As Opioid Epidemic Worsens, Rethinking How Doctors Are Taught to Treat Pain

Pain is the most common reason that people go to the doctor. Yet physicians and medical students have limited training in pain management and prescribing opioids. As the nation suffers from an opioid epidemic, people within the medical field are reexamining what doctors are taught about pain. NewsHour Weekend's Christopher Booker reports.

CHRISTOPHER BOOKER: As the number of U-S prescriptions for opioids doubled over a 15 year period from 105 million in 1998 to 207 million in 2013, the number of fatal overdoses from the drugs soared almost fivefold, from four thousand deaths a year in 1999 to nearly nineteen thousand in 2014. That includes people who illicitly used prescription opioids and those who overdosed on pills prescribed for them.

As recently as the early 1990’s, doctors were criticized for not prescribing enough painkillers, according to David Thomas, a doctor who works for the National Institute of Drug Abuse, known as NIDA.

DAVID THOMAS: Back then, there was a thing called opioid-phobia. A lot of healthcare professionals did not want to prescribe opiates at all, because they thought you give the slightest amount, you turn your patients into addicts. And so even people with stage four cancer weren’t being given opiates, they were left to suffer.

BOOKER: Dr. Zebley says prescribing opioids wasn’t a treatment option he even considered for chronic pain when he graduated from the University of Maryland School of Medicine 40 years ago.

JOSEPH ZEBLEY: Back then, if we wrote for even Tylenol with codeine you would have a precept, or someone, looking over your shoulder and wondering why you were using a narcotic.

THOMAS: I think there was a number of well meaning health care providers that said, "This is wrong. We have to take care of people in pain. And we have the means, we have opiates." Instead of just using them to some degree to help people, they were starting to be used just as a replacement for comprehensive pain treatment.