ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows the nation’s drug epidemic is continuing to grow, with 2020 now the deadliest year on record for drug overdose deaths.

​Opioids are continuing to be the driving cause of drug overdoses, with numbers that are continuing to rise throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. But one central Florida surgeon is changing up the typical way patients recover after surgery in an effort to safely cut down on opioid use — and it's helping patients.

When Andria Herr developed a gallstone and needed to have surgery to have her gall bladder removed, she said she knew one thing right away. She didn’t want to take opioids.

“I’ve seen firsthand what they can do, how quickly people can become addicted and end up losing their jobs, losing their marriages, losing all sorts of things in their lives up to and including their lives," Herr said. "And I wasn’t willing to do it. I would have rather been in pain, but the good news is I ended up not being in pain. It was an exceptional protocol.”

She turned to Dr. Luke Elms, a general surgeon at Orlando Health Dr. P. Phillips Hospital.

“I see patients in my practice that come specifically because they are concerned about being exposed to opioids,” Dr. Elms said. “Their number one concern is pain control. And so we have to be careful that in the battle against the opioid epidemic, we don’t just pull opioids away from people and leave them suffering because that would be cruel. You know, that’s not the goal. We need to replace opioids with something that is effective and that can provide adequate pain control in the recovery."

A recent national study from Orlando Health found 65% of Americans are more worried about trying to manage their pain than the risks of opioid addiction. But more than two-thirds of Americans surveyed said they would be willing to try opioid-free pain management after surgery.

That’s important, Dr. Elms said, because it’s become so common for people to become addicted to opioids.

To curb potential addiction and unnecessary opioid use, Dr. Elms utilizes a pain control method that uses over-the-counter drugs like ibuprofen, acetaminophen and muscle relaxers to directly target a patient’s pain. And he’s seen success with this method. 

“Their pain control is much better, that realistically most of them had a significant decrease if not elimination of the need of opiates," Dr. Elms said. "And their recovery was faster, they felt better."

“I was in very little pain," Herr said. "I was swollen and so you would expect that with any surgical intervention like that, that was a good source of discomfort but not pain. And I was able to manage the pain, quite honestly, with an over the counter protocol that Dr. Elms gave me."

Herr said it didn’t take long before she was feeling better altogether, grateful that after her surgery she could focus on her recovery without needing to worry about opioids at all.

“You can do this without opioids, you really can. Don’t take the risk,” Herr said. 

Dr. Elms’s multimodal pain control method is part of a larger opioid avoidance program within Orlando Health, but this kind of multimodal pain control is already being used by hospital systems across the country.  He said he's hopeful that this method can become even more widespread across the country to better help patients feel better while helping to curb the opioid epidemic.