Published January 2, 2019 This content is archived.
Richard D. Blondell, MD, professor of family medicine and vice chair of addiction medicine, is interviewed about a letter in the journal Pain Medicine that urges U.S. policymakers to develop guidelines for tapering patients off opioids that are not “aggressive and unrealistic”. "Whether it's a fast taper or a slow taper, the big question is -- well, what do you do after that?" he said. "What we really need is better science, not more politics . . . In my experience, when you have global recommendations based on expert opinions and you try to apply those to individual patients at individual clinics there's a lot that gets lost in translation."