Opioid overuse pain syndrome (OOPS): the story of opioids, prometheus unbound

Throughout history, opioids have effectively alleviated pain but not without the risk of addiction and death. Seductive and dangerous, full of promise and destruction, opioids are both revered and feared by Western culture. Their exponential use in "developed countries" is now an enormous public health problem and requires us to harness their properties with scientific rigor and adequate safeguards. The use of opioids for the treatment of chronic nonterminal pain (CNTP) has been a relatively new phenomenon which has coincided with the proclamation by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organization in 2000 that pain assessment be the "fifth vital sign," notwithstanding the fact that pain is a symptom and not a sign.(1) Nonetheless, this resulted in a culture of a marked increase in use of opioids for acute and chronic pain management. Consequently, there are many unintended outcomes which include opioid-induced hyperalgesia increased diversion, addiction, and death. Understandably, this has resulted in many regulatory responses from such agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and state medical boards. This article proposes a clinically relevant paradigm of opioid overuse pain syndrome. The goal of this article is to inform the clinicians of the complicated neurobiology of opioids. It is our hope that scientists rather than government regulators dictate the appropriate response to the epidemic of over prescription of opioids. A similar designation of "medication overuse headache" has resulted in near extinction of excessive use of opioids in the field of headache medicine.