Doesn’t have to be a pain.

You know what’s tough? Managing cancer-related pain in someone with an opioid use disorder. On the one hand, you clearly can’t ignore legitimate pain. On the other, it’s not best practice to dole out narcotics to someone with a documented addiction that can easily prove lethal. Now we have consensus guidelines that point us to the use of an oral buprenorphine/naloxone combo. Buprenorphine is a partial opioid agonist that, unlike our standard opiate go-tos, has fewer addictive properties. Plus it’s difficult to abuse. It actually starts to have antagonist properties at levels higher than prescribed, and the naloxone additive is a failsafe against attempts to abuse it by other routes of administration. | Fitzgerald Jones, JAMA Oncol 2022