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Paul Crawford, Jeremy T Jackson, Christy J W Ledford, The Association Between Acupuncture Training and Opioid Prescribing Practices, Pain Medicine, Volume 20, Issue 5, May 2019, Pages 1056–1058, https://doi.org/10.1093/pm/pny243
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Dear Editor,
Prescription opioid abuse is a national emergency, and there has been a call for a national response and to rethink the problem as a public health issue with increased training and consideration of alternative treatments [1,2]. Most patients with pain are managed in the primary care setting [3], and family physicians prescribe more opioids than any other subspecialty [4]. These factors stimulate the search for alternatives to opioid prescription for pain in primary care.
Acupuncture has been widely studied in both Westernized and traditional Eastern medicine as a successful treatment for patients coping with many mental and physical ailments, both in terms of improved health outcomes and patients’ perceived outlook on life and health attitudes [5]. A large gap in the literature exists regarding whether learning new pain management techniques (i.e., acupuncture) subsequently reduces opioid prescribing in physicians.
Our cross-sectional survey data presented here are drawn from an omnibus survey conducted by the Clinical Investigations Committee of the Uniformed Services Academy of Family Physicians (USAFP). The sampling frame for the survey was all USAFP family physicians who registered to attend the annual scientific assembly in March 2017. Data were anonymously collected from participants at the meeting. E-mail invitations to participate in the survey were delivered to the remaining members not in attendance on the day of presentation. One follow-up e-mail to encourage nonrespondents to participate was sent after the initial invitation. This study was approved by the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences Institutional Review Board.
