[Opioid guidelines: yesterday and today: current guideline recommendations for chronic non-tumor pain].

Guidelines on opioid therapy for patients with chronic non-tumor pain should support pain relief, prevent iatrogenic suffering, collateral health damage and legal restrictions on the availability of opioid analgesics. A total of six North American and two European committees recently developed guidelines which differ from the previous ones by being based on many more randomized controlled trials. In anticipation of lower analgesic effects than are to be expected from solely consensus-based guidelines, they recommended a more thorough control of individual therapeutic opioid trials than before. Drafting recommendations for a preferably individual efficacy prognosis is a further objective of the guidelines. This article will discuss if previous and current recommendations of opioid guidelines meet these requirements.