Because of a soaring number of opioid-related deaths during the past decade, opioid use disorder has become a prominent issue in both the scientific literature and lay press. Although most of the focus within the emergency medicine community has been on opioid prescribing-specifically, on reducing the incidence of opioid prescribing and examining alternative pain treatment-interest is heightening in identifying and managing patients with opioid use disorder in an effective and evidence-based manner. In this clinical review article, we examine current strategies for identifying patients with opioid use disorder, the treatment of patients with acute opioid withdrawal syndrome, approaches to medication-assisted therapy, and the transition of patients with opioid use disorder from the emergency department to outpatient services.
Herbert C Duber, Isabel A Barata, Eric Cioè-Peña, Stephen Y Liang, Eric Ketcham, Wendy Macias-Konstantopoulos, Shawn A Ryan, Mark Stavros, and Lauren K Whiteside.
Department of Emergency Medicine, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, WA. Electronic address: hduber@uw.edu.