In November, Kaiser Health News reporter Michelle Andrews shared her own experience, in which her surgeon prescribed 90 oxycodone/acetaminophen (Percocet) tablets after what she termed a minor laparoscopic knee surgery. When she asked her surgeon why so many, he said it was the default in his hospital's ordering system for knee procedures. "If you had real surgery, like a knee replacement, you wouldn't think [90] was so many," she quoted him as saying.
Andrews didn't say what she had done with her unused pills, but Bicket's group said safe disposal is uncommon. People who do want to get rid of them usually throw them in the trash or flush them down the toilet, but it's just as common, if not more so, to hoard them for some future pain episode. Or give them to friends and relatives who complain of pain.
Still another study, published in December in JAMA Surgery by a group in Boston, found a high rate of "potential overprescription:" patients discharged with opioid prescriptions even though they hadn't received any opioids during their last 24 hours as inpatients. More than 40% of patients who were opioid-free at discharge in the study still went home with prescriptions.