You Might Not Need to Prescribe that Opioid After Dental Surgery

Do you really need to prescribe an opioid after dental surgery? Possibly not to every patient, according to new research presented at PAINWeek 2021. This doesn’t just mean that fewer opioid-naive patients would be exposed to an opioid, researcher Todd Bertoch, MD, told Pain Medicine News. “The dental impaction pain model has been the main acute pain model that's used to assess the efficacy of analgesics,” Bertoch, the CEO of JBR Clinical Research, in Salt Lake City, explained—meaning that results of wisdom tooth removal studies can in some ways be applied to other examples of acute pain.