Patients who are prescribed opioids to manage their joint pain after total knee and total hip arthroplasty (TKA and THA) procedures may remain on opioids long term, well after they have ceased to experience improvements in their pain, according to collaborators at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, and the University of Cincinnati.
Publishing in Pain (2016;157:1259-1265), the investigators hypothesized that patients may continue taking opioids for other reasons, including pain elsewhere