The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has proposed new opioid prescribing guidelines that will drop its prior recommendation of specific limits on doses of opioid painkillers when treating chronic pain patients, among other changes. The proposed update seeks to amend the CDC’s current guideline for prescribing opioids, issued in 2016, which had sparked a dramatic decline in pain pill prescriptions across the United States, but drew criticism from chronic pain sufferers, who contended they were being denied much needed pain relief. “We began to hear how the guidelines were being misused and misapplied,” the CDC’s Christopher Jones, a co-author of the draft guidance, told The Associated Press. The latest proposal acknowledged that studies have been published on doctors’ misapplication of the 2016 CDC Guidelines, which the agency pointed out were not mandatory in the first place and were intended to be flexible to “support, not supplant,” individualized patient …