Morphine eases pain, doesn't shorten life

Wed Apr 4, 2007 7:30AM EDT
By Anne Harding
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - When given in the appropriate doses to treat cancer pain, morphine will not hasten a patient's death by interfering with his or her breathing, a new study shows.
The findings contradict the conventional wisdom-held by many medical professionals as well as lay people--that giving dying patients opioids for pain can shorten their lives by depressing their respiration. "It's in all the textbooks as something to be aware of, but probably the risk has been exaggerated," Dr. Declan Walsh of The Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio, one of the study's authors, told Reuters Health. "It's not that there isn't a risk, but that we've been perhaps been overly concerned about it."