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Potential total knee patients are likely to be very worried about opioids, and less likely to postpone surgery if they can be convinced their pain will be managed with strategies that de-emphasize or eliminate them. Those are among the key takeaways from a recent survey supported by SPR Therapeutics, which markets implants designed to provide opioid-free peripheral nerve stimulation, and published in Reconstructive Review, the journal of the Joint Implant Surgery & Research Foundation.

More than two-thirds of patients reported unused prescription opioids following surgery, and safe storage and disposal rarely occurred, according to a study published by JAMA Surgery that strongly suggests that overprescribing after surgery is fueling the nation's opioid addiction and abuse crises.

An Indiana man shot and killed a pain management physician last week, apparently as retaliation for refusing to prescribe opioids for his wife's chronic pain, police say. Todd Graham, MD, 56, was a physical medicine and rehabilitation specialist at South Bend Orthopaedics and a consulting physician at the University of Notre Dame. "He did what we ask our doctors to do," said St. Joseph County (Ind.) prosecutor Ken Cotter at a news conference. "Don't overprescribe opioids."

Physicians at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., have called themselves out for overusing opioids to manage post-op pain and say a lack of evidence-based prescribing guidelines is to blame.

According to new research, green light alleviated pain in naïve rats and in rats with spinal nerve ligation (SNL), a model of chronic neuropathic pain. Investigators determined that green light exerted its effects through the visual system and required the release of endogenous opioids in the central nervous system.