Opioid rules hurting those in the most pain
By Paula Span, New York Times
If you’ve come to rely on opioids for chronic pain, as a growing proportion of older adults has, you may have noticed that the drugs are becoming more difficult to get.
Something had to be done, surely: More than 165,000 people died from overdoses from 1999 to 2014.
But recent restrictions on access to these painkillers are likely to disproportionately affect the elderly — despite the fact that abuse and misuse of these painkillers have historically been lower among older patients than younger ones.
Older patients are simply more apt to have chronic pain.