LAWRENCE, Mass. ― Rachael Pomerleau, 40, had taken opioids before, having had procedures like wisdom teeth removal and gallbladder surgery.
But during the tumultuous two years that her children, now ages 7 and 8, were born, opioids took over her life, she told HuffPost. She was put on bed rest as a result of complications with the pregnancy of her daughter. A few months after her daughter’s birth, she became pregnant with her son. This time, her back and abdominal pain grew so severe that doctors prescribed Vicodin followed by Percocet during her pregnancy ― which wasn’t an unusual prescription for pregnant women at the time, prior to the onset of the opioid epidemic.
“It hurt so bad,” she said. “There were times when I could hardly walk without being in pain.”
When Pomerleau returned from maternity leave for the second time, she said, she lost her job at a local health care services company. And she kept taking opioids ― oxycodone this time ― this time prescribed to her by her primary care doctor.
Women like Pomerleau, who was prescribed opioids in a medical setting and became addicted to them, are a growing demographic in the United States’ opioid epidemic. Although men continue to have higher rates of substance use than women do, the gap between the sexes is narrowing, with prescription opioid overdose deaths rising 583 percent among women between 1999 and 2016, compared to 404 percent among men, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse[2].[1]
But even as prescription opioid death rates grow among American women, doctors, researchers and policymakers don’t yet understand how to properly screen for or address female opioid users’ unique needs. In