More Guidelines Emerge on Opioid Prescribing After Surgery

While some believe the overprescribing of opioids after surgery is widespread, a lack of evidence-based guidelines may be hampering efforts to reduce post-surgery opioid use, according to researchers from the University of Michigan. But in a research letter published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers found that distributing a guideline to surgery teams at 43 hospitals in the state reduced post-surgery opioid prescribing by almost a third.  The average prescription size dropped from 26 pills before the guideline was distributed in October 2017 to 18 pills ...