BlueCross BlueShield (BCBS) of Tennessee, the state's largest insurance provider, is starting the year off with some significant changes—they have dropped Oxycontin from their list of covered prescriptions and added acupuncture coverage.
Dr. Andrea Willis, Chief Medical Officer for BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, said "We knew it was a public health problem, and that we weren't part of the solution. We were part of the problem."1
Tennessee, who has the third highest per-capita opioid prescription rate in the U.S., lost approximately 1,200 people in 2017—America's worst year for drug overdoses.2-3
Oxycontin has been replaced with Xtampza (an extended-release, abuse-deterrent capsule formulation of oxycodone), and Morphabond (oral tablets containing morphine sulfate, an opioid agonist).4 The formulas of Xtampza and Morphabond are more difficult to crush and delay the high.1 Despite the fact that these replacement drugs cost more, BCBS will keep member co-pays the same as they were for Oxycontin.
Although Tennessee's population of licensed acupuncturists is minimal compared to states like California or New York, the hope is that other insurance providers across the U.S. will soon follow the Volunteer State's lead.
References
Chronic pain afflicts over 20% of the adult population. Sadly, most MDs have essentially no education in treating pain, beyond offering a few toxic medications. Then they tend to steer people with pain away from those health practitioners who are trained. This puts the acupuncture community on the front lines for addressing this epidemic.
When the body is going through a stressful event, the sympathetic system is activated. This activation will help the body with a life-threatening situation. If this state is activated for prolonged periods of time, it starts to consume energy. These traumatic events that generate stressors in the autonomic nervous system (ANS) will eventually become internalized.
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One of the things that makes acupuncture so difficult to measure is that the medicine actually does contain some esoteric aspects. There have been numerous studies that demonstrate the neurochemical reasoning behind why acupuncture points stimulate the autonomic nervous system to enact change However, not all the benefits of TCM can easily be measured by randomized, controlled trials. But does that make them fundamentally and definitively untrue?
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