Episode #15: How easy is it to get addicted to opioids?

TPR PODCAST EPISODE #15: HOW EASY IS IT TO GET ADDICTED TO OPIOIDS?     As has been well reported in medical papers, government studies and popular media, rates of overdose deaths from opioids have been increasing steadily over the last several decades. A recent article in the New York Times reported that there were likely more than 59,000 drug overdose deaths in 2016, an estimated 19% increase over the number in 2015. The total for 2017 is likely to be even higher.   Many deaths have been associated with prescription opioid analgesics, or have occurred among patients who became addicted to prescription opioid analgesics and then went on to use cheaper and more available forms such as heroin. As I detailed in my 2013 Emergency Medicine News column “The Dark Truth Behind Pain as the Fifth Vital Sign,” the trend towards increased use of opioid analgesics really took off in the 1990s, and was encouraged by some leading pain “specialists” who insisted that studies demonstrated that opioids were virtually never addictive when used to treat chronic pain. The sole basis for this claim was a one paragraph, five-sentence letter to the New England Journal of Medicine (often referred to as the Porter-Jick “study”) that described, not outpatients treated for chronic pain, but hospitalized in-patients. A recent excellent short paper by Zhang et al points out that this one letter was subsequently cited 608 times, often uncritically and often as evidence that long-term us...
Source: The Poison Review - Category: Toxicology Authors: Tags: Podcast Source Type: news