These days prescription painkillers and heroin is taking more lives due to overdose than any other type of drugs, and this has made doctors and government officials around the country to look out a solution.

This Tuesday at a hospital in Virginia, the emergency department received a new 14-point guideline that is focused on curbing opioid misuse and addiction. This guideline encourages doctors to avoid the prescription painkillers to their patients and to give them a three-day supply in really extreme cases.

Painkiller-cancer-treatment
The pain-killer and anti-inflammatory drug, Diclofenac, may have peculiar anti-cancer properties. Credit: Huffington Post

The main goal doing this is to limit and short down the number of people who use narcotic painkillers in the long run and at least that hospitals acknowledge that the police might be on a spike in heroin use.

The vice president of clinical services and chief executive for VCU Hospitals, Dr. John F. Duval stated that this is an important first step to stop the addiction problems. “Our hospitals, our physicians, our clinicians across the country are on a front line that knows no boundary. So any solution that we bring forward has to be multifaceted, it has to be multidimensional”

The state of Virginia in an effort to fight this broken treatment situation, it is expected that on the next fiscal year budget of about $11 million, that will be used to eliminate the often month-long waiting list where the poorest addicts are looking when their request to help them on state treatment centers.

Also, President Barack Obama compared last month the growing death toll as a treatment that must be positioned alongside the promotion of a strong economy and the threat of terrorism on the federal government’s priority list, where he will seek about $1.1 billion to expand the treatments on opioid addictions.

Painkiller taking over lives

 Actually, the prescription of painkillers and heroin have killed more than 4,400 people just in Virginia since 2007, and more than 1,300 babies were born addicted to these drugs from 2011 to 2014.

Agencies and task forces created by the Virginia government have been working trying to help treat addiction and reduce significantly the number of overdoses, but so far those attempts have failed due the rise of the death from prescription painkillers and heroin that were on pace to rise about 10 percent from the first three-quarter of 2015.

Source: Fredericksburg