During and after our work to create procedure-specific guidelines, I watched the government and some insurance companies continue to issue draconian policies that limited opioid prescriptions to a 4-, 10- or 30-day supply. How could anyone dictate hard-and-fast limits when the amount of pain resulting from every procedure was different? Drilling bone to do a hip replacement is far more of a shock to the system than a lymph node biopsy.
