2022 AMA Overdose Epidemic Report

The American Medical Association Substance Use and Pain Care Task Force continues to advance evidence-based recommendations for policymakers and physicians to help end the nation’s drug-related overdose and death epidemic.

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Recommendations

Physicians must continue to lead, and policymakers must base further action on evidence-based interventions. The Task Force’s five recommendations build on previous work and are as follows:

Collect better data.

Support patients with pain, mental illness or a substance use disorder (SUD) by building an evidence-based, sustainable and resilient infrastructure and health care workforce.

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Remove treatment barriers.

Remove barriers to evidence-based treatment for SUDs, co-occurring mental illness and pain.

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Support individualized pain care.

Support coverage for, access to, and payment of comprehensive, multi-disciplinary, multi-modal evidence-based treatment for patients with pain, a substance use disorder or mental illness.

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Support comprehensive public health and harm reduction strategies.

Broaden public health and harm reduction strategies to save lives from overdose, limit the spread of infectious disease, eliminate stigma and reduce harms for people who use drugs and other substances.

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Improve multi-sector collaboration.

Improve stakeholder and multi-sector collaboration in an effort to ensure that the patients, policymakers, employers, and communities benefit from evidence-based decisions.

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Task Force History

The AMA has united two task forces into a new effort to directly address the changing drug overdose epidemic, focus on removing racial, gender, sexual orientation and other health-related inequities, and provide updated recommendations to physicians, policymakers and other stakeholders.

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Be part of the solution.

Join the AMA today and help us lead the effort
to reverse the nation’s opioid epidemic.