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Have you ever used the Clinical Opiate Withdrawal Scale (COWS) to ascertain whether your patient might be experiencing opioid withdrawal?

Considering the current prevalence of opioid misuse, it’s not unlikely that a patient admitted for a non-drug-related cause could be a person who uses opioids—someone who may or may not have shared that information with you.

The Clinical Opiate Withdrawal Scale is one of many helpful points of assessment and management discussed in this month’s CE article, “Acute Pain Management for People with Opioid Use Disorder.”

Compassionate, informed, nonjudgmental care.

This article, not specifically about unrevealed opioid intake, focuses on the management of acute pain in a person who is known to use opioids because they are currently on medication-assisted treatment (MAT)—that is, someone receiving methadone, buprenorphine, or naltrexone for opioid use disorder who is also experiencing acute pain from (for example) cancer, or after surgery or trauma.

This isn’t such an unlikely scenario, considering the following numbers:

In 2016, nearly 350,000 U.S. patients with opioid use disorder were treated with methadone, more than 60,000 were treated with buprenorphine, and more than 10,000 were treated with naltrexone.

Compassionate, nonjudgmental care for people who are dealing with serious illness as well as with an opioid use disorder can help ensure that the patient doesn’t experience the additional stress of unrelieved acute pain. Read more in this month’s AJN.