Were Consequences of CDC Guideline Unintended?

CDC Opioid Prescribing Guideline: Unintended Consequences? – July 2018 – an angry essay by yours truly, Angelika Byczkowski (Zyp Czyk)

I’m sick and tired of reading over and over how all the entirely predictable consequences of the CDC Opioid Prescribing Guideline were “unintended” and “unforeseeable”.

The broad misinterpretation of the guideline as establishing fixed limits on opioid prescribing has stranded hundreds of thousands of pain patients in agony without the effective relief they had achieved with opioids.

Yet we are expected to believe that these consequences were “unintended” and “unforeseeable” by the guideline authors. Most pain patients realized right away that the guideline’s suggestions would become codified rules, no matter how little evidence supported them.

And we were right – more than we ever imagined…