A new study found nine out of 10 primary care physicians believe prescription drug use is a moderate to severe problem and say they are less likely to prescribe opioid painkillers than they were a year ago.
The findings highlight the growing awareness opioid-associated risks, such as addiction and overdose, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health reported.
"The health care community has long been part of the problem and now they appear to be part of the solution to this complex epidemic," said study leader G. Caleb Alexander, MD, MS, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and co-director of Johns Hopkins' Center for Drug Safety & Effectiveness.
To make their findings the researchers sent out a survey in February 2014 to a "nationally representative sample of 1,000 U.S. internists, family physicians and general practitioners," which had a response rate of 58 percent.
About 85 percent of the respondents said they believed opioids are overused in clinical practice, and many claimed to be "very" or "moderately" concerned about risks including addiction, motor vehicle accidents, and death. The majority also reported they believed adverse events such as tolerance and physical dependence occur "often."
Eighty-eight percent of the surveyed physicians believed in their own ability to properly prescribe pain medications such as opioids. This may be based on the fact that primary care physicians tend to believe their clinical skills are superior to their peers'. Past studies have shown the majority of doctors believe their peers' prescribing decisions are swayed by concepts such as pharmaceutical marketing, but suffer no such bias themselves.
The researchers noted studies using pharmacy data are needed to confirm whether or not opioid prescriptions are actually on the decline, but they hope the findings will help encourage doctors to turn to non-opioid treatments for pain more often.
The findings were published Dec. 8 in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.
