Doctors Over-prescribing?

This is nothing new to chemical dependency counseling or addiction physiology in general, but doctors might be over-prescribing people. Doctors are begining to be to quick to grab for their prescription pads...more on this...

"NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - U.S. doctors are too quick to reach for their prescription pads, according to a new report urging them to think more about side effects and non-drug alternatives.

"Instead of the latest and greatest, we want fewer and more time-tested drugs," said Dr. Gordon Schiff, associate director of the Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, a non-profit organization that studies ways to improve safe practices in healthcare.

Yet many doctors are quick to prescribe a drug, partly because they have limited time to deal with individual patients or because they and their patients have been bombarded with ads from the pharmaceutical industry.

As for prevention and non-drug alternatives, Schiff said, "there are no drug reps coming to my office pushing that."

In an editorial in the same journal, researchers describe how opioid painkillers like Vicodin and Percocet have become increasingly common without good evidence that they help patients in the long run.

The evidence of harm, on the other hand, is clear, write Dr. Deborah Grady of the University of California, San Francisco, and her colleagues.

 

In 2007 alone, for instance, there were nearly 11,500 deaths related to prescription opioids -- "a number greater than that of the combination of deaths from heroin and cocaine," according to the researchers."

SOURCE: http://www.nw32.com/health/sns-rt-us-hold-those-drugstre75c5k7-20110613,0,257...

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