Maybe to provide another little context around that, back in Kingston last night I was speaking about this with an emergency room physician I highly respect. He said that 20 years ago we used opioids to treat patients for palliative care or for cancer pain, and we did a really crummy job treating everybody with non-cancer chronic pain.
Over that 20 years, opioids and other drugs have emerged as legitimate therapeutic agents. The guidelines that have been referred to have been an attempt to define, I think, what that best practice would be, and I think they've largely done that. What we're talking about now is the unintended consequence of having successfully treated a large number of people with chronic pain; now we have the fallout, which hasn't been as well managed.
The guidelines I think are good, and the challenge is going to be in the knowledge translation, in getting them into practice, off the paper and into practice. One of the things we've done, working with a group based at McMaster University, is work to develop these knowledge-for-practice tools that can be used at the bedside. We've cosponsored an online education module based on those guidelines that is being developed by a group at Memorial.
So there's certainly a role, I think, for professional groups to participate in this kind of knowledge translation. There potentially could be a role for governments as well to assist in the dissemination of good information—information that we all agree is reasonable—and making sure that it translates into the way things really roll out on the ground.