Routine Dental Procedures are a Prime Gateway to Opioid Dependence

There are Non-Opioid Alternatives

One of the prime entry points to opioid dependence for teenagers and young adults are opioid-based painkillers prescribed to treat pain after dental procedures, such as wisdom teeth extraction.
While there has been a welcome reduction in the number of these prescriptions written nationally and here in Rhode Island, we are still over-prescribing. Rhode Island dentists, for example, wrote nearly 19,000 prescriptions for opioid pain killers in 2023; about 1-in-4 of those were a patient’s very first exposure to opioids.
This is despite the fact that a series of pain studies have shown that in most cases non-opioid alternatives such as a combination of ibuprofen and acetaminophen—or for those allergic to these medicines—gabapentin, provide satisfactory pain relief. A new Rutgers Health Study published in The Journal of the American Dental Association, for example, finds that a combination of acetaminophen (Tylenol) and ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin) brings more pain relief after wisdom tooth removal than opioids. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002817724006391
A Stanford University study published in JAMA Internal Medicine documents the negative impact of these prescriptions: “Of nearly 15,000 young people who received initial opioid prescriptions from their dentists in 2015, 6.8 percent had additional opioids prescribed between 90 and 365 days later, and 5.8 percent were diagnosed with opioid abuse during the 12 months after the initial prescription. In a comparison group that did not receive an opioid prescription from their dentists, 0.1 percent got another opioid prescription and 0.4 percent were diagnosed with opioid abuse over the same period.” https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2018/12/opioid-prescriptions-from-dentists-linked-to-youth-addiction-risk.html
It takes as little as 5 days to become dependent on an opioid painkiller.
Talk to your dentist about safe non-opioid pain relief alternatives that do not risk opioid addiction with its sometimes deadly consequences.

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