What Role Does the Physician Play in Prescription Drug Abuse?
Siobhan Morse, Executive Director of The National Institute for Holistic Addiction Studies discusses the role physicians play in prescription drug abuse.
What is prescription drug abuse?
Prescription drug abuse means using a controlled, mind-altering substance without a prescription from a physician or using a prescribed medication for the sole purpose of achieving a pleasurable, mind-altering effect.
Medications typically abused include: opioid painkillers such as Vicodin and Oxycontin, sedative hypnotics such as Valium and Ambien, selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, also called SSRIs, and other anti-depressants and stimulants.
What Role Does The Physician Play In Prescription Drug Abuse
Prescription drug misuse refers to a patient’s diverting controlled drugs for sale as well as physicians prescribing a controlled drug for a patient when a better pharmacological awareness or a more thorough examination would have suggested that the drug was contraindicated.
Methods used to obtain prescription drugs
Patients use a variety of methods to obtain controlled substances illegally. These include: doctor shopping, doctor manipulation, symptom fabrication, and prescription forgery as well as certified and illegal Internet pharmacies of which about 800,000 were estimated to exist worldwide in 2007.
The deadly impact of prescription drug abuse
The dimension of the crisis can be visualized in this way. Currently, there are approximately 780,000 licensed physicians in the United States with about 15,000 new graduates joining their ranks each year.
A survey conducted by The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University found that a majority of doctors do believe it is their primary responsibility to prevent prescription drug abuse.
Unfortunately, most physicians received only two hours or less of training in prescription drug diversion in medical school, residency, and continuing medical education.
Additionally, in the pharmaceutical company’s enthusiasm to offer promising new drugs to the public, new training and information needed to prevent prescription drug abuse is not always adequate to prevent the occurrence of over-dispensing and the inappropriate use of prescription drugs, treating the symptom and not the disease. These physicians will proceed to treat the symptoms of the disease, but not the disease itself.
Consequently, common symptoms of addictive disease such as depression, anxiety, insomnia, and migraines, tend to be treated as separate disorders. Furthermore, many of these symptoms will be treated with a controlled medication that might not be appropriate if the primary diagnosis is addictive disease.
This prescribing can lead to unwitting abuse and dependence by the patient who will continue to take the medication without being aware that it may be harmful.
This approach leaves the underlying addictive disease alive and undisturbed, treating only its symptoms thereby postponing indefinitely the opportunity for appropriate treatment and recovery.
What Role Does the Physician Play in Prescription Drug Abuse
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