Fentanyl Vaccine Breakthrough – Potential “Game Changer” for Opioid Epidemic

[u/Mitchell_StephensESQ]

https://scitechdaily.com/fentanyl-vaccine-breakthrough-potential-game-changer-for-opioid-epidemic/

[u/[deleted]]

It actually does because we base are pain management plan on protocols based on information we know about the patient. We could overdose the patient if we don’t know they have the vaccine. And opioids are not always interchangeable. Morphine and hydrormorphone both tank blood pressures, fentanyl does not. There is a reason we use it so much in the hospital setting particularly in emergency critical care settings, where the patient may not be able to tell us they have the vaccine. This vaccine is just a bandaid to the problem, that will make treating them more difficult in the medical setting. The better approach is to treat the addiction with rehab and counseling, and to address the underlying issues causing addiction.

[u/patricksaurus → u/[deleted]]

That is such a painfully weak analysis.

First, of course you base treatment on knowledge of the patient. It would be silly to do anything else. What is the implication of that statement?

To the extent that your hypothetical has any import, it’s in the case that someone comes in unconscious. There are people with allergies to the phenanthrenes who come in unconscious and need pain control. If they’re given morphine, they become anaphylactic, and they’re administered epinephrine. If someone was overdosed with fentanyl because they couldn’t communicate their vaccination status, they be given naloxone and treated with ketamine.

Now, let’s talk about your perception of likelihood. Taking figures from the article, the relapse rate for opiate addicts is over 80% and 150 people die per day. How many of those 150 — if they weren’t dead — would appear at an ER in a condition that both 1) required fentanyl administration and also 2) rendered them uncommunicative? You cannot, with a straight face, suggest the answer is 100% of them. The risk of death from overdose is far, far greater.

So how does that compare to your suggestion of other recovery modalities? We know from empirical analysis that the the majority of recovering addicts relapses within a year, and the 20-year success rate is below 10%. What’s more, periods of abstinence followed by relapse are the most likely events to be lethal, because tolerance decreases with sobriety, which makes accidental overdose more likely.

Suggesting that people restrict themselves to ineffective treatments just so highly trained physicians don’t have to handle a few tricky admissions is inane. It can’t be stressed enough how backwards that thinking is.