For the first time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has come out against doctors prescribing highly addictive opioid painkillers, The Washington Post's Karoun Demirjian and Lenny Bernstein report.
The nonbinding guidelines from the federal government recommend that doctors prescribe alternative courses of treatment before resorting to opioid painkillers to treat chronic pain. The guidelines have been developed in light of the national public health crisis of addiction to heroin and narcotic painkillers.
The CDC estimates that almost 28,700 people died from overdoes from prescription opiods and heroin in 2014, The Post reports.
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