DANVILLE – As a number of people continue to die from overdoses of opioids, a local health system is taking steps to help with the epidemic. Geisinger Health System has been part of a growing trend that aims to offer alternatives to pain killing medications.
Dr. John Quick is with Geisinger’s Pain Medicine Department, “We’re trying to look at patients and treat them from a multi-disciplinary aspect, where the overall goal is to get patients as functional as possible on as little medications as possible. I think the trend going forward is looking at multiple treatment aspects, first offering things such as injections, specifically targeting the painful region, and these can be muscle injections and joint injections and epidural steroid injections.”
They also offer physical therapy, aqua therapy and even acupuncture. Quick says for many cancer patients, opioids are the answer, but that’s not the case for other patients, “For patients with chronic non-cancer pain, lets say for back pain or joint pain, for those individuals, the studies are showing that opioids may not be as beneficial, and may even be harmful to some patients in the long term.”
Dr. Quick says each patient is different and must be considered individually, even as a multi-disciplinary plan is implemented.