Partnering With Dentists and Oral Surgeons to Fight Opiate Addiction

From the blog of Dr. Nora Volkow, Executive Director of NIDA, posted July 25, 2018

Reducing the reliance of doctors on potentially addictive opioid pain relievers has been one of the pillars of federal efforts to reverse the opioid crisis. Because many dental procedures such as extractions and other types of oral surgery often produce severe acute pain, dentists are among the largest prescribers of opioids. Thankfully, the dental profession has made significant progress in reducing opioid prescriptions. Two decades ago, when the opioid crisis was just starting, dentists accounted for 15.5 percent of all immediate-release opioid prescriptions; by 2012, they only wrote 6.4 percent of such prescriptions. Still, those in the oral health professions can play a key role in further improving the treatment of acute pain and making it safer.

In March of this year, the American Dental Association (ADA) released a new policy on opiods, supporting limits on dosage and duration of opioid prescriptions and mandatory continuing education on their use, as well as recommending that dentists make use of their regional prescription drug monitoring program (PDMP). This policy is an important step toward protecting patients and their families from the potential harms of opioids. Following a meeting between representatives of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR), and the ADA, NIDCR director Martha Somerman and Dr. Volkow wrote an editorial in this month’s issue of the Journal of the American Dental Association about how a partnership between NIH and oral health practitioners can continue to alleviate the opioid overdose epidemic.

Increased knowledge of opioid prescribing practices among dentists, as well as among emergency department physicians when managing acute dental pain, is an important research priority. While dentists have reduced their opioid prescriptions, recent studies suggest the same is not true of emergency department providers when patients have dental pain. A study of Medicaid recipients showed that physicians in the ER prescribed opioids for dental pain five times more often than dentists in their own practices, and nurse practitioners in the ER prescribed opioids three times as often. Understanding the ways opioids are prescribed and the decisions underlying opioid prescribing can inform new clinical guidelines and policies to reduce the risks of opioid misuse. 

Concluding Remarks

Dentists can play a role in minimizing opioid abuse through patient education, careful patient assessment and referral for substance abuse treatment when indicated, and using tools such as prescription monitoring programs. Research is needed to determine the optimal number of doses needed to treat dental-related pain. Besides reducing their prescribing of opioids, these practitioners can learn to screen for opioid misuse and opioid use disorders, ultimately referring patients to treatment when indicated. To this end, NIDCR plans to fund research studies of interventions in rural communities.

These practitioners cannot assume that their prescribing of opioids does not affect the opioid abuse problem in the United States. Dentists, along with other prescribers, take steps to identify problems and minimize prescription opioid abuse through greater prescriber and patient education; use of peer-reviewed recommendations for analgesia; and, when indicated, the tailoring of the appropriate and legitimate prescribing of opioids to adequately treat pain.