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If we look at this, this is the
total number of people who have pharmacy claim and you can see that about two-thirds of
them get a narcotic. What is kind of interesting is that in the orthopedic literature,
they’ve looked at how many orthopedic surgeons prescribe narcotics for their patients
with various spinal problems. And about 3% of orthopedic patients get narcotics. So I
guess that means you go to your primary care physician for the narcotic and not to the
orthopedic surgeon. This is obviously a major cost. And the Health Plan is interested to
see if they can cut down on the use of narcotics and thereby the amount of money spent of
treatment of back pain. This just gives you some sort of local frame work for what happens
and how much money we’ve spent on LBP patients. |