Drug Abuse in America: Part 2/3

Have you been to an ER in the last decade? If so, do you remember being asked about your pain level? The infamous question in the adult realm, "Sir, can you rate your pain on a scale of 0-10... zero being no pain and ten being the worst pain you've ever had in your entire life." Every wonder why this was? Maybe you weren't even in pain and they still asked you. Do you remember being in the ER perhaps two decades ago where there wasn't a big push to know what your pain was? Maybe, you weren't even asked.

What is JCAHO and what might it have to do with the drug abuse problem in the US?

JCAHO is an abbreviation for Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations.  It is an organization made up of individuals from the private medical sector to develop and maintain standards of quality in medical facilities in the United States.Okay, great Jordyn, how can this possibly relate to the prescription abuse problem in the USA?

Joint Commission comes out with goals for medical care of patients. In the 90's, one of their thoughts was that pain was not being adequately addressed among healthcare professionals so it became a standard for them to have us ask, evaluate and treat patients' pain.

This Time magazine piece gives a nice consensus about how well intentioned bureaucracy intrusion can have disastrous effects on how medical care is delivered and ultimately leads to consequences for the patient:

"The U.S.'s opiate jag began, like so many things, with the best of intentions. In the 1990s, the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) — the accrediting body for hospitals and other large care facilities — developed new policies to treat pain more proactively, approaching it not just as an unfortunate side effect of illness but as a fifth vital sign, along with temperature, heart rate, respiratory rate and blood pressure. As such, it would have to be routinely assessed and treated as needed. "It was a compassionate change," says Barber. "Patient-advocacy groups pushed hard for it." And, she points out, drug companies did too, since more-aggressive treatment of pain meant more more-aggressive prescribing.

But the timing was problematic. The new JCAHO policy went into effect in 2000, which was not only about the time the new opioids were hitting the market but also shortly after the Federal Trade Commission began allowing direct-to-consumer drug advertising. When market, mission and product converge this way, there's little question what will happen. And before long, patients were not only being offered easy access to drugs but were actually having the medications pushed on them. No tooth extraction was complete without a 30-day prescription for Vicodin. No ambulatory surgery ended without a trip to the hospital pharmacy to pick up some Oxy. Worse, people with chronic pain were getting prescriptions that could be renewed again and again."

What other government policies do you think are having a negative effect on patients?

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