Airing Pain 123: Opioids and Chronic Pain

Rethink­ing long-term pain management

This edi­tion of Air­ing Pain has been sup­port­ed with a grant from Kyowa Kirin donat­ed for this purpose. 

The opi­oid cri­sis reached its peak in the Unit­ed States in 2017, where addic­tion and over­pre­scrip­tion have led to 218,000 deaths from pre­scrip­tion over­dos­es between the years of 1999 and 2017. The side effects of opi­oids can affect the day-to-day activ­i­ties of peo­ple man­ag­ing long-term or chron­ic pain, yet soci­ety as a whole has yet to ful­ly eval­u­ate the rela­tion­ship between opi­oids and addic­tion.  

In this edi­tion of Air­ing Pain, pro­duc­er Paul Evans talks to two lead­ing pain spe­cial­ists. First off, Paul Evans meets with Dr Srini­vasa Raja, who dis­cuss­es opi­oids effects on the body’s opi­oid recep­tors and how the human body process­es pain. Dr Cathy Stan­nard then talks about the increase of opi­oid pre­scrip­tions in the UK and how the opi­oid cri­sis in the Unit­ed King­dom devel­oped. 

In the sec­ond half of the pro­gramme, Paul speaks with Louise Trew­ern, a chron­ic pain patient and patient advo­cate, about opi­oids’ detri­men­tal effect on her qual­i­ty of life and how she was able to tran­si­tion towards more effec­tive meth­ods of chron­ic pain man­age­ment. 

Final­ly, Paul sits down with Dr Jim Hud­dy, a GP in Corn­wall, who explains how the med­ical com­mu­ni­ty is re-eval­u­at­ing the rela­tion­ship between opi­oids and chron­ic pain. 

Issues cov­ered in this pro­gramme include: Can­cer, chemother­a­py, exer­cise, fibromyal­gia, med­ica­tion, neu­ro­path­ic pain, opi­oids, painkillers, phys­io­ther­a­py, pre­scrip­tion for pain, psy­chol­o­gy, side effects and dosage.

Con­trib­u­tors:

• Dr Srini­vasa Raja, Pro­fes­sor of Anaes­the­si­ol­o­gy and Crit­i­cal Care Med­i­cine and Neu­rol­o­gy at the Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­si­ty School of Med­i­cine, Mary­land, USA  
• Dr Cathy Stan­nard, Con­sul­tant in Pain Med­i­cine and Pain Trans­for­ma­tion Pro­gramme Clin­i­cal Lead for NHS Glouces­ter­shire Clin­i­cal Com­mis­sion­ing Group 
• Louise Trew­ern, Vice Chair of the Patient Voice Com­mit­tee at the British Pain Soci­ety 
• Dr Jim Hud­dy, Corn­wall GP and Clin­i­cal Lead for Chron­ic Pain at NHS Ker­now Clin­i­cal Com­mis­sion­ing Group. 

More infor­ma­tion:

• British Pain Soci­ety – britishpainsociety.org 
• Opi­oid pre­scrib­ing for chron­ic pain guid­ance – england.nhs.uk/south/info-professional/safe-use-of-controlled-drugs/opioids 
• Fac­ul­ty of Pain Medicine’s opi­oids resources – fpm.ac.uk/opioids-aware.

With thanks to:

• The British Pain Soci­ety (BPS), who facil­i­tat­ed the inter­views at their Annu­al Sci­en­tif­ic Meet­ing in 2019 — britishpainsociety.org
• The Inter­na­tion­al Asso­ci­a­tion for the Study of Pain (IASP) iasp-pain.org.