The American Dental Association is asking dentists to drastically cut back on prescribing opioid painkillers.
The association is recommending that dentists do not prescribe opioids for pain for longer than a week and supports mandatory training on using other painkillers.
It also supports that dentists register with prescription drug monitoring programs, which allow for tracking of medications to make sure patients aren’t receiving opioids from multiple doctors, either to sell them or for personal use.
Dental procedures can cause acute pain, so dentists sometimes prescribe opioids such as Vicodin or Percocet for relief after a root canal or tooth extraction. Evidence has demonstrated that ibuprofen and acetaminophen can work well for dental pain, according to a study in the Journal of the American Dental Association.
“As president of the ADA, I call upon dentists everywhere to double down on their efforts to prevent opioids from harming our patients and their families,” ADA President Joseph Crowley said. “This new policy demonstrates ADA’s firm commitment to help fight the country’s opioid epidemic while continuing to help patients manage dental pain.”
People with opioid addictions often become hooked after receiving a prescription from a doctor, and then turn to illegal opioids such as heroin, which are cheaper and more readily available. Those illegal drugs are driving overdose deaths, which surpassed 42,000 in 2016.
In 1998, dentists were the top specialty prescribers of opioids, accounting for 15.5 percent of all opioid prescriptions in the U.S. By 2012, the percentage had fallen to 6.4 percent, the association said.
