Western Medicine’s Caution to Opioids
Dr. Anna Lembke’s take on the issue with over prescription of pain meds in the US. Some highlights from her interview discussing her book, Drug Dealer M.D., on NPR’s Fresh Air.
Why we are in this predicament:
“Starting in the 1980s, doctors started to be told that opioids were effective treatment for chronic pain, and that treating patients long-term with opioids was evidence-based medicine,” she says. “That was patently false and that was propagated by what I call ‘big medicine,’ in cahoots with Big Pharma.”
On treating patients with perplexing pain and limitations:
“I see a lot of patients with mysterious chronic pain syndromes, and many of them are young people who otherwise have no evidence of disease, but are completely debilitated and nonfunctional by their mysterious chronic pain syndromes.
What ends up happening to these patients often is they get “medicalized,” and by that I mean they end up seeing four or five or 10 different specialists. Everybody has a different diagnosis. They get poked and prodded and “surgerized,” and by the end of it they come out five or 10 years later with real bonafide physical problems because they’ve had so many surgeries and so many interventions. And by then they’re also on very high-dose opiates.”
For full interview:
