Between 2008 and 2021, opioid consumption in Spain has tripled. “Pharmaceuticals have sold us that pain can disappear to 100%, and that’s false,” the specialists say in the report published by El Salto. Opioid painkillers are intended for very specific pain, severe short-term pain (after an intervention) and terminally ill cancer patients, but are generally misused and in some cases professionals are seeing dependence and disproportionate use.

For example, to combat chronic pain opioids have become widespread. “These drugs were used only in the first palliative treatments, but gradually their use has spread to the care of chronic pain, and as chronic pain is increasingly present, because we live longer and accumulate diseases, they have become another instrument,” says El Salton, emphasizing the importance of balanced consumption.

“Very dangerous” opioid fentanyl

In Spain, medications that combine paracetamol with trambol are the most commonly used and fentanyl is the second most consumed country. The World Health Organization recommends morphine for medium-severe pain, but in Spain fentanyl is used more, “probably by commercial pressure”, according to the article of El Salto. This opioid is a hundred times stronger than morphine and report experts warn that it is very dangerous because of the high degree of attenuating effect and dependence it produces: “Pain Units easily recycle fentanyl, recycle young people with chronic diseases and is very dangerous.”

A recent warning from the European Medicines Agency is that medicines that combine ibuprofen with opioid codeine are consumed in excess and at doses higher than necessary, which can lead to addiction and side effects.

Although we are far from this reality, we must remember that disproportionate drug use is a real epidemic in the United States. More than 100 people die every day from opioid use.

For chronic pain, what?

Experts advocate the multidisciplinary treatment of patients: specialized traumatologists, physiotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists... and especially a health system that responds quickly and does not wait for people with pain and waiting list. For this, resources are obviously needed, “and it is much cheaper to give the pill to the patient, but people will develop dependency and condemn it to a questionable quality of life. People need to be given tools to learn how to live in pain and take care of them properly to make this pain sustainable.”

The current social model after medicalization

To understand excessive medicalization, we have mentioned the dynamics of the health system and that today citizens live longer and with more diseases. Another factor highlighted by physician Aitor Montes is the current rhythm of life. In order to be able to respond to working conditions, responsibilities, concerns…, we citizens also know that the pill is a faster solution than dealing in depth with the disease, pain or problem we suffer: “We are doctors the last poem of people, but we cannot solve the problem of the model of society.” Often, the panorama of the health system does not help much either: the one who goes to the doctor with an injury, for example, has to rehabilitate himself and go to the physiotherapist, but there is no fission, the rehabilitations and the traumatologists are collapsed, and also many times the patient must continue working, has a solution.