No, I’m not talking about putting fentanyl into my own veins — a remarkably bad idea. I’m questioning the habitual, reflex use of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, in clinical anesthesiology practice.

I’ve been teaching clinical anesthesiology, supervising residents and medical students, in the operating rooms of academic hospitals for the past 18 years. Anesthesiology residents often ask if I “like” fentanyl, wanting to know if we’ll plan to use it in an upcoming case. My response always is, “I don’t have emotional relationships with drugs. They are tools in our toolbox, to be used as appropriate.”

But I will say that my enthusiasm for using fentanyl in the operating room, as a component of routine, non-cardiac anesthesia, has rapidly waned. In fact, I think it has been months since I’ve given a patient fentanyl at all.

Here’s why.

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Poppies, the original source of opium…  

A fentanyl overdose led to the recent death of musician and singer Prince, according to the medical examiner’s report released June 2. The drug seems likely to become as notorious as propofol did after the death of Michael Jackson in 2009.

For all of us in anesthesiology who’ve been using fentanyl as a perfectly respectable anesthetic medication and pain reliever for as long as we can remember, it’s startling to see it become the cause of rising numbers of deaths from overdose.  Fentanyl is a potent medication, useful in the operating room to cover the intense but short-lived stimulation of surgery. The onset of action is very fast, and the time that the drug effect lasts is relatively brief.

But fentanyl was never intended for casual use. Fentanyl is many times more potent than morphine; 100 micrograms, or 0.1 mg, of IV fentanyl is roughly equivalent to 10 mg of IV morphine. In March, the LA Times reported that 28 overdoses — six of them fatal — occurred in Sacramento over the course of just one week. The victims had taken pills that resembled Norco, a common pain reliever, but in fact the pills were laced with fentanyl. Even tiny amounts were enough to be lethal.

Like all opioids, fentanyl reduces the drive to breathe, and after a large enough dose a patient will stop breathing entirely. In addition to its effect on respiratory drive, fentanyl may also produce rigidity of the muscles in the chest and abdomen, severe enough to hamper attempts to ventilate or perform CPR.

What exactly is fentanyl?

Fentanyl is an inexpensive member of a class of drugs called “opioids”, which are powerful pain relieving medications. The word “opium” is derived from the Greek word for juice, because the juice of the poppy flower was the original source of opium. Starting in Mesopotamia, the opium poppy has been cultivated since at least 3000 BC. The term “opiate” is used to designate drugs derived from opium. Morphine was the first of these, isolated in 1803, followed by codeine in 1832.

The development of techniques to synthesize drugs in a laboratory, as opposed to the cultivation of poppy fields, has led to the use of the term “opioids” to refer to any and all substances that treat pain by acting on opioid receptors in the central nervous system. The term “narcotic” is often used as a synonym. It’s derived from the Greek word for stupor, and is used to refer to any morphine-like drug with the potential for addiction.

Fentanyl is cheap, and the powdered form is being synthesized in clandestine laboratories in the U.S. and Mexico according to news reports. What’s leading to the spate of new overdoses is the fact that some dealers are quietly adding fentanyl to heroin to increase the “high”. A user injects what he thinks is his usual quantity of heroin, not realizing that it may be mixed with fentanyl. The mixture is far more potent and may be deadly.

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It’s amazing how quickly my role switched from physician to patient, thanks to a silent assailant: osteoporosis.

I went to the gym in the morning before work 12 days ago, as I often do now that my children are all grown up and out of the house. First, a couple of light sets of leg exercises served as a warm-up, and then I started a set with a barbell on my shoulders. I’ve been doing weight training for years, since my mother suffered badly from osteoporosis and I knew I was at risk. Weight training, along with calcium and Vitamin D, can help maintain bone density.

The weight was average for me, and I was halfway through my second set of 12 repetitions when suddenly there was a loud noise, like a sharp crack or pop, that people in the gym heard 10 feet away. I felt my mid-spine collapse downward what seemed like an inch, accompanied by sharp pain. The trainer grabbed the weight, helped me lie down, and called my husband.

I did a quick self-assessment.

Can I move everything? Check.

Is anything numb? No.

Can I do a straight leg raise without more pain? Yes.

This confirmed that I didn’t have any spinal cord injury and probably didn’t have a herniated disk. The most likely diagnosis was a spinal compression fracture, which turned out to be exactly what happened.

Off to the emergency room

My husband insisted on driving immediately to the emergency room, which gave me a little time to reflect.

By coincidence, September is “Pain Awareness Month”, and I had been wanting to write a piece in support of the American Chronic Pain Association and the American Society of Anesthesiologists‘ recognition of pain as an endemic problem. Chronic pain ruins lives, and inappropriate treatment of pain with narcotics too often leads to addiction, overdose, and death.

But what to write?? I treat acute pain in my daily work as a physician anesthesiologist looking after patients in the immediate recovery timeframe, right after surgery. Sometimes I take Aleve for a headache, but that’s about it. Now, of course, it seemed much likelier that I would have a story to tell.

Luckily for me, the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center emergency room was relatively quiet at 6 a.m. The staff whisked me off to X-ray, and the technician quickly took supine and lateral films. He said, kindly, “Ma’am, I’m not a doctor, but it looks to me like you have a compression fracture.” He printed out the films for me to see, and of course he was right. A nurse gave me some morphine, which eased the pain considerably, and then it was time to consider next steps.

Conservative treatment or intervention?

My fracture was at the level of the 12th thoracic vertebra or “T12”, the commonest site for compression fractures. This is hardly a rare problem. One in four American women will have a vertebral compression fracture during her lifetime, and men can suffer them too. The most common cause is osteoporosis, a condition in which bone loss over time results in weak, brittle bones.

The emergency room physician ordered a CT scan to see the extent of the fracture in more precise detail, and to see whether or not any bone fragments were endangering the spinal cord. Then he called a neurosurgeon, Dr. Khawar Siddique, to see me.

The neurosurgeon outlined treatment options. Basically, there were three:

Conservative treatment: a back brace, pain medications, and 6-8 weeks of rest, with gradual mobilization;

Surgery: thoracic fusion;

Kyphoplasty: a less invasive procedure to stabilize the fractured vertebra.

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