Doctors Raise Alarm About Shortages Of Pain Medications

[steve from amherst]

In hospitals across the country, anesthesiologists and other doctors are facing significant shortages of injectable opioids. Drugs such as morphine, Dilaudid and fentanyl are the mainstays of intravenous pain control and are regularly used in critical care settings like surgery, intensive care units and hospital emergency departments.

The distance that medical science has traveled in the past hundred years in pain management is practically miraculous. Walk into a pediatric intensive care unit at any major hospital in the country and, even though the children you'll see are critically ill from disease and surgery, you won't see any of them squirming in the bed in pain or discomfort. Though a child in this ICU may be diagnosed with an incurable disease, pediatric doctors are able to use hydromorphone, fentanyl and liquid morphine to keep the patient's suffering at a distance.

The same is true for pain management in adults. And it's not just the patient who is spared — relatives, friends, not to mention doctors, nurses and the other health care providers don't have to experience a cherished human being writhing in agony.

That is why doctors across the country have grown increasingly concerned that hospitals and other medical facilities have been running low on or out of the supplies they need. Dr. Red Starks, a pediatric anesthesiologist who has been practicing for 26 years, said that for him, the shortage "escalated late this spring when we didn't have any morphine."

"Or one week we had morphine, but we didn't have Dilaudid," he continued, "and two weeks later, we'd get a little trickle of Dilaudid, but we wouldn't have any morphine. And you're just thinking, 'Hello, am I in the 21st century?' "