1588: Best of – Dr. Anna Lembke Says Overprescribing Doctors To Blame For Opioid Addiction

While Jimmy is gone on a much needed and deserved sabbatical for six months to rest and recuperate, we will be bringing you the best of the best from the vast archive of shows that Jimmy has accumulated over the last 15 years. We also will be airing shows from his wildly popular JIMMY RANTS live show that originated on Instagram Live and now resides at JimmyRants.com.   “This has been a very sad chapter in the story of modern medicine.” Dr. Anna Lembke   Opioid addiction has become a very serious problem in the United States alone as a whopping 16,000 people die annually from overdosing on painkillers such as morphine, methadone, Buprenorphine, hydrocodone, and oxycodone using the name brands OxyContin, Percocet, Vicodin, Percodan, Tylox and Demerol. And 75% of people who are addicted to heroin got their start on one of these seemingly innocuous pain medications they were prescribed by their well-meaning doctor attempting to help them recover from an injury or surgery. This is something an assistant professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, psychiatrist and addiction medicine specialist named Dr. Anna Lembke has seen so often as a pattern in her own patients dealing with opioid addiction that she wanted to sound the alarm on this growing epidemic in an alarming new book that is rocking the medical community called Drug Dealer, MD: How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It’s So Hard to Stop. Listen in as Jimmy and Dr. Lembke discuss all the statistics regarding opioid prescription prevalence and the correlation with the increased drug addiction, why most doctors who get their patients addicted don’t know what to do about it, the lack of help from insurance companies to pay for recovery, the millions who have to cope with this out of no fault of their own, the misguided cultural paradigm that demands a pill solution to every health problem, the role of the pharmaceutical companies in this epidemic, the problems in the Affordable Care Act that give precedence to pills, procedures, and patient satisfaction over wellness, and the broken healthcare system that needs to be completely overhauled and fixed in order to resolve this problem that isn’t going away anytime soon. This is one of the most explosive interviews on a hot topic we’ve had in a while. Please share it with anyone taking prescription pain medications or dealing with opioid drug addiction.