Early physical therapy can reduce risk, amount of long-term opioid use, study finds

Patients who underwent physical therapy soon after being diagnosed with pain in the shoulder, neck, low back or knee were approximately 7 to 16 percent less likely to use opioids in the subsequent months, according to a new study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Duke University School of Medicine. For patients with shoulder, back or knee pain who did use opioids, early physical therapy was associated with a 5 to 10 percent reduction in how much of the drug they used, the study found.
Amid national concern about the overuse of opioids and encouragement from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other groups to deploy alternatives when possible, the findings provide evidence that physical therapy can be a useful, nonpharmacologic approach for managing severe musculoskeletal pain. "We asked ourselves, 'How can we address the pain that people are having, while not increasing their risk of needing opioids?'" said Eric Sun, MD, Ph.D., assistant professor of anesthesiology, perioperative and pain medicine at Stanford. "And what our study found was that if you can get these patients on physical therapy reasonably quickly, that reduces the probability that they'll be using opioids in the longer term."