Kurt Kroenke, M.D., explains the importance of transparency in opioid use and pain management in NFL athletes.
Transcript:
We’ve learned the last five to 10 years about the risks of opioids. So it’s a safety and health issue. Certainly there’s been attention to the use of any controlled substances in athletes. That’s why the players association partnered with the owners in this kind of database. So the data was all open. Every team put their prescription data and their use of pain medicine data into the same system. So it was a very transparent process.
Dr. Kroenke says opioid use among NFL athletes has decreased dramatically thanks to safer pain management options.
Transcript:
Since we’ve had guidelines on opioid use, the good news is that only 10 percent of NFL athletes get even a single prescription for an opioid during a year — which means 90 percent don’t — and more important, of all pain medicines prescribed, opioids are only 3 percent, so they tend to be not widely used. Most of the pain medicines used are what we call NSAIDs, which are the things people know as ibuprofen, naprosyn. They can be prescribed or available over the counter.
Dr. Kroenke speculates on why opioid prescriptions are higher in the general population than NFL players.
Transcript:
What these findings suggest is that opioid prescriptions in NFL athletes are not higher than in the general population … and probably lower. And that’s probably because we’ve had a lot of opioid prescribing for chronic pain in the general population. Most of what NFL athletes experience will be recent pain. They’ve had an injury. They’ve had pain after a really tough game. So this is mainly looking at the use of opioids for acute pain.
