Calmare Therapeutics Inc (fka CTTC)

[powderbum]

Great Article on Insurance needs to pay for non-pharma alternatives to opioids"

https://www.tribtoday.com/news/local-news/2020/01/chiropractor-says-med-free-options-still-not-available/

Some efforts have been made to curb the overprescribing of opioids in hospital settings, but little has been done to guarantee health care facilities and insurance plans are using and covering the medication-free interventions that have been proven to keep a person off the gateway drugs that can eventually lead to illicit use, said Dr. Patrick Ensminger

The restrictions on the prescriptions — without plans to wean a patient off the meds or to replace the treatment with a medication-free option, like physical therapy or chiropractic therapy — may have driven more opioid users to the streets, he said.
American patients were 70 times more likely to be prescribed an opioid than a person seeing a doctor in Europe.

The report found “U.S. physicians are still dramatically overprescribing opioids for pain, rather than referring cases to drug-free health care providers,” Ensminger said.

Methods to reduce the prescriptions often lead to just pushing back the time it takes for the physician to give an opioid, or replacing the opioid with a similar drug.

“That opioids are still actually commonly prescribed for run of the mill musculoskeletal pain is not progress,” Ensminger said. “Right now, the MD might say, ‘I don’t do opioids anymore, so I’m going to send you to pain management or I’m going to send you to an orthopaedic specialist.’ Guess what they’re going to get there? ‘Well, you don’t qualify for surgery, so here’s a course of opioids, go to the pain management.’ And the, ‘Well we tried an epidural and it didn’t work, so here’s some opioids.’ So they still end up getting that kind of management, it’s just being pushed upstream.”

And the opioids don’t treat the underlying issue; they cloud the pain of an issue. Physical therapy and chiropractic work may have a chance at eliminating the problem after a treatment plan is implemented and followed, Ensminger said.

These practices continue in health care facilities, despite federal and state guidelines that recommend the alternative treatments, Ensminger said.

A study of over 200,000 patients with first time back pain found if someone saw a chiropractor before an MD, 90 percent were less likely to get prescribed an opioid than if he or she saw a doctor first, said Ensminger, referring to the study published in BMJ Open, a national medical journal.

“Our doctors are well meaning and want to do the right thing for their patients but they are stuck in an American health care culture where there’s a drug for everything. The United States spends more than twice as much per capita on health care as other developed nations and yet we rank a disappointing 37th in overall health globally,” Ensminger said.

Efforts to negotiate with insurance companies and health care facilities has led to little change, he said.

Ohio chiropractors want a “seat at the table” with regulators and insurance companies as they create rules and plans for the future because they want to help people with chronic pain in a way that doesn’t endanger their patient with addiction, Ensminger said.

Changing the price structures of the insurance plans can lead to a real change in what services people opt for and has a chance of changing the culture surrounding pain treatment in the U.S., he said.