‘Addictive and ineffective’: GPS urged to stop offering opioids

OPIOID painkillers do not work for nine in 10 people with chronic pain, health experts have warned, as they called for GPS to be more cautious about prescribing addictive drugs.

The NHS hands out prescriptions for opioids to 5.6million adults each year, but for people with long-term debilitating pain, they will not work in 90 per cent of cases.

Dr Cathy Stannard, a consultant in pain medicine at NHS Gloucestershire, warned that doctors often felt pressured to prescribe strong painkillers because people were suffering, and “in the throes of that encounter they end up writing a prescription”.

“We respond to distress by trying to help,” she told a briefing in central London, as she warned it was a “harsh fact” that there was little to be done for most people. “Opioids are probably overprescribed and I don’t even know to what extent. The prescribing is more prevalent than you would imagine, given the effectiveness of the drug.”

Dr Stannard said she had recently stopped one opioid prescription for a patient in prison, but when he complained that he would have to go back to his cell in pain, she upped his dose of another opioid.

“That is the last thing I should have done,” she told the panel.

Opioid prescriptions have more than doubled in 20 years, and in 2017-18 5.6million adults (one in eight) in England were prescribed an opioid, according to recent figures from Public Health England.

The drugs are from the same family as heroin, and there are fears that people could end up addicted to them in a similar way to people in the US, where the reliance on strong medication has reached epidemic levels.