Why Are Doctors To Blame For Prescription Drug Abuse?

The annual number of prescription painkiller overdose deaths have increased five hundred percent since 1990; but who is there to blame for this drastic increase in numbers? Doctors should be held responsible for the abuse of prescription drugs among people. At first, it seemed that doctors were not taking pain serious enough and they were failing to prescribe the right doses of painkillers to their patients. Sadly, this could have possibly started an epidemic of doctors prescribing too much medication to their patients. How did doctors go from not prescribing enough to making one of the nation's leading causes of death pharmaceutical drug overdoses? Lately, there seems to be a fine line between helping patients and curbing drug abuse. Since doctors seemed to be under prescribing painkillers, they eventually were urged to use the medicine that they had to help the patients feel better. This seemed to have gotten out of hand in the last ten to twenty years. Matt Berry says, “Although prescription drugs are necessary and lifesaving in many circumstances, the correlation between prescription drugs and prescription drug addiction is undeniable”(Are Doctors to Blame for Prescription Drug Abuse?). Doctors are aware of this alarming correlation and should have been
more cautious when prescribing narcotics to so many patients. It looks as though physicians could be hurting these people more than they ever were helping them. In our world, nobody wants to ever have an imperfect reputation. This mindset is also carried through when it comes to hospitals or medical facilities. If a patient feels that they need a painkiller or a higher dosage but the doctor disagrees, then the patient could get mad and accuse the facility of not giving proper care. Multiple cases like these could result in upset people who no longer want to attend that hospital or facility. Elements Behavioral Health said, “This reliance on patient satisfaction surveys can motivate doctors to make decisions regarding patients and their schedule of pain meds that are against their personal ethics. The heavy focus on patient satisfaction does not allow doctors to appropriately recognize and reject “drug-seeking behavior.”(Prescription Drug Addiction: Who’s to Blame?). Essentially, patients are trusting in doctors who actually are not taking their health into consideration when prescribing medications. This is not entirely the doctor's’ fault but a patient’s health is surely more important than what people think of the facility’s care. This public health epidemic is one that is uniquely American; no other countries have quite the opioid problem like the United States.
Americans are not skeptical enough about prescription pills. They never really look into what they are taking and that is going to negatively affect their health in the long run. American people will hear that a pill will take away pain and they will do anything to get it. It is truly a disease to be addicted to opioids since you won’t even be able to function without your daily dose because the mind is telling the people that they need it. Other countries are much better off without having all these medications and that will result in a healthier population for those
countries. The opioid epidemic has stemmed from a doctor named Dr. Russell Portenoy. He wrote a letter explaining that there was no chance that patients would get addicted to a drug like opioids so it was safe for doctors to prescribe it to patients with chronic pain. Portenoy ended up being quite inaccurate considering the four hundred sixty seven thousand people in the United States suffering from an addiction to opioids.