Safer Opioid Prescribing and Non-opioid Alternatives for Chronic Pain

Abhimanyu Sud, in an interview with Ross Upshur, talks about the current opioid crisis, the challenges and the opportunities to respond to the crisis at different levels including improved prescriber education and use of evidence-based non-opioid alternatives for chronic pain. Abhimanyu Sud is the Academic Director of Safer Opioid Prescribing at Continuing Professional Development at the University of Toronto. A graduate of Yale University and the University of Toronto, he is a community-based family doctor who also has a focused practice in comprehensive chronic pain medicine. He has played an active role in advocating for comprehensive and effective solutions for Canada’s opioid crisis and in particular for the role of evidence-informed education in chronic pain and opioid prescribing at all levels of medical training. He is a Lecturer at the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine. Sud’s current work is focused on educational and research interventions around opioid prescribing in the context of chronic pain. He is also working on projects around non-opioid alternatives for the management of chronic pain. The podcast is greatly informative of what exactly Dr. Sud is currently doing, especially on the use of non-opioid alternatives for the management of chronic pain. A glance at Abhimanyu’s article on the National Opioid Crisis in PubMed.