The CDC Replaces Flawed 2016 Opioid Prescribing Guideline with a Flawed 2022 Opioid Prescribing Guideline

Responding to medical experts, including the American Medical Association, who have been complaining for years that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2016 Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain lacked a strong basis in the evidence—and after it issued an Advisory in 2019 stating the Guideline was misinterpreted and “misapplied” by state lawmakers and health care practitioners—the CDC announced it was going to revise the Guideline before the end of 2022. Unfortunately, 38 states have already cast the flawed 2016 Guideline in stone by enshrining—and misapplying—all or part of it in statutes that dictate how health care practitioners may treat patients in pain.