June is Men’s Health Month, and this year it brings rare good news about one of the deadliest threats men face. In May, the CDC reported that opioid deaths declined for a third consecutive year in 2025. As an anesthesiologist, I find that progress especially meaningful: men account for roughly 70 percent of opioid overdose deaths and die at about 2.5 times the rate of women. If this epidemic has always hit men hardest, the recent decline is, in a real sense, their reprieve.
The reasons for the drop are many — wider access to the overdose-reversing drug naloxone, expanded treatment, a shifting street-drug supply. But one contributor rarely makes the headlines, and I see it every day in the operating room: anesthesia.
The connection runs through surgery. For most Americans, the first prescription opioid arrives after an operation or injury — and for men, that operation is usually orthopedic: broken bones, knee arthroscopies, rotator cuff repairs. Men are simply more trauma-prone and tend to reach the orthopedic table earlier in life. Blue-collar and workers-compensation injuries deepen the pattern, and those patients are a little more likely to wind up on heavy-duty pain medicine.
The danger is not the surgery itself but what can follow it. About 8 to 10 percent of people who fill a first opioid prescription are still taking opioids 90 days later. The medical term for that is opioid use disorder. A single post-surgical prescription, in other words, sets roughly one in 10 patients on a path toward dependency. That risk is largely genetically driven, but a great deal of it comes down to opportunity — and because men encounter surgery and injury more often, they meet that opportunity more often, too.
Over the past decade, my colleagues and I have quietly worked to narrow it. The central idea — the biggest change in anesthesia over the past 10 to 15 years — is what we call multimodal analgesia: using a little of several different agents rather than a lot of any one. Round-the-clock acetaminophen and ibuprofen, layered with other non-narcotic drugs, can blunt pain enough that opioids become a backup for breakthrough pain rather than the basis of recovery.
The most powerful advance is regional anesthesia: ultrasound-guided nerve blocks. We can now see most large nerves on ultrasound and place the local anesthetic right beside them. Improved imaging has made arm, leg, chest and abdominal blocks routine, delivering 24 to 72 hours of targeted pain relief. When a patient’s leg is numb, he does not need opioids at all — though there is an art to it, since we still want him able to get up, walk and care for himself.
This has reshaped surgery itself. Procedures that once meant a week in a hospital bed now send patients home the same afternoon, pain-controlled and often without a narcotic prescription. Today, 80 to 90 percent of knee replacements are same-day surgery in an outpatient facility — typically a spinal, light sedation and a block at the end for 24 to 48 hours of relief. Without systemic opioids clouding their thinking, patients are clearer after surgery and recover more readily at home.
For our most vulnerable patients, the goal is now zero. In elderly hip-fracture cases, we strive to be completely opioid-free whenever possible, placing blocks in the emergency room before the operation even begins.
At U.S. Anesthesia Partners, we treat this as measurable, not aspirational. Multimodal analgesia is a federal quality measure, and when we began tracking it around 2017, compliance across our network sat near 50 percent. Today it exceeds 95 percent. We have also invested heavily in training, running regional conferences each year to teach clinicians how to perform these ultrasound-guided blocks.
The long-intended benefit of fewer opioids in circulation is finally reaching the population as a whole.
The principle underneath all of this is almost old-fashioned: it is generally easier to prevent pain than to treat it. That is a fitting message for Men’s Health Month. The men most likely to face the surgeon’s knife — and most likely to die when a prescription becomes a habit — are increasingly protected by a change few of them will ever notice. It is one of the least-celebrated public-health advances of the decade, and this June, it is one worth recognizing.