Educational Activities Archives

Opioids are commonly prescribed for chronic pain, but are also associated with a risk for serious harms, including overdose and opioid use disorder. This course reviews risk factors for opioid misuse, opioid use disorder, and overdose in patients with chronic pain, explains methods for screening and assessing for problematic opioid use, reviews methods for mitigating risks associated with prescribed opioids, and details non-opioid treatment approaches for pain. The course is based on principles in the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s guideline on opioids for chronic pain and reviews recent evidence on benefits and harms of opioids.

This module reviews introductory information regarding pain, different types of pain, acute versus chronic pain, and how to perform a pain evaluation. It describes a comprehensive pain assessment integrating a socio-psycho-biological approach and identifies the impact of psychosocial factors, including mental health, on the pain experience.

This activity focuses on the assessment and management of pain using multimodal treatments that reduce the reliance on opioid analgesics. Learners are introduced to information on the principles, mechanisms, and frameworks relevant to multimodal analgesia, with an emphasis on non-pharmacological techniques and non-opioid medications. Applications of multimodal treatments for pain to various clinical settings are reviewed, as well as relevant case studies for the treatment of acute and sub-acute pain.

This activity focuses on the assessment, mitigation and management of risk when prescribing opioids for analgesia. Learners are introduced to the concept of universal precautions and their role in opioid therapy, as well as to practical monitoring and documentation strategies. The fundamental principles of urine drug testing and interpretation are also reviewed, as is the differential diagnosis of opioid misuse. Special attention is given to overdose prevention, naloxone co-prescribing, and how to recognize and respond to an emerging opioid use disorder when prescribing chronic opioid therapy for pain.

In this module participants review how to identify the main principles of pain treatment in opioid use disorder and to describe how these principles are applied to the treatment of acute pain as well as chronic non-terminal, non-cancer pain in OUD. Specifically, participants will learn to manage opioid withdrawal and acute pain in patients with OUD during hospitalization with and without receiving concomitant MOUD. Participants will examine strategies in formulating a multimodal pain plan for chronic pain in patients with OUD.

Participants will be introduced to the vocabulary of addiction and the root causes of addiction especially in the adolescent, as well as the epidemiology of opioid overdoses and deaths in the United States as a public health phenomenon, with particular attention paid to the decreasing rate of illicit opioid use in adolescents over the past decade. The learner will also, with this background, have reinforced the predicates of opioid misuse in adolescents and, through clinical examples, learn how to recognize possible misuse and address misuse in adolescents seen in a medical setting. Finally, safe prescribing principles will be introduced.