Here are five key points.
1. Sports medicine physicians must understand the magnitude of the issue,
Dr. Mandelbaum advised in the Medscape article.
CBS News
reports that more Americans died from opioid-related overdoses in 2016 than the
entirety of the Vietnam War.
Dr. Mandelbaum suggested addiction be treated as a medical diagnosis to
gain access to covered addiction treatment.
2. Exercise, in combination with behavioral modification and addiction
medications such as methadone, can be a powerful prescription for patients
suffering from addiction, Dr. Mandelbaum said. He has found it essential
to develop relationships with rehabilitation programs to which he can
refer patients.
3. Dr. Mandelbaum stressed the importance of identifying high-risk patients
and focusing on non-opioid pain management therapies. Only when icing,
compression and sometimes electrical stimulation fail does he prescribe
the synthetic opioid tramadol.
4. When patients ask for opioids, Dr. Mandelbaum informs them he is effective
at pain management and his surgical technique aims to avoid causing pain
in the first place.
5. Success in pain management requires careful monitoring. "I ask
patients to score their pain on a one-10 visual analogue scale. Not only
does this help me analyze the situation of an individual patient, but
it allows me to evaluate my success across my practice by averaging the
scores of dozens of patients. And by participating in the Arthrex Surgical
Outcomes System, I can compare my results with those of other physicians,"
Dr. Mandelbaum wrote in the Medscape article.
Read the
full article here.