Letter: Doctors should not be held responsible for painkiller addiction

Editor,

Society has no business blaming a painkiller-prescribing doctor for an already-addicted patient’s death. Any doctor, out of his professional compassion and duty, is going to place pain management first, and is not expected to know a whole lot about the usual patient presenting, in particular if the patient is an addict. Besides, where does a prescribing standard leave off and “over-prescribing” begin for agonizing, unrelenting pain?

An addict is an addict. When it comes to physically addicting drugs, too, recovery is the addict’s responsibility, not the prescribing doctor’s. It is not the doctor’s fault that her patient is an addict. How is a doctor even going to know in just the few minutes she spends with a patient that he is an addict?

Plus there is doctor shopping, hopping from one doctor to another to get one’s supply; an addict can get pretty clever about this. Then the patient dies from untreated addiction and the doctor gets taken to court by a prosecutor.

Addicts know that it was not their fellow addict Michael Jackson’s doctor’s fault – the one who got called to the mat. If not from that doctor, Jackson could have gotten his fix from another. Some say he did.

This is why West Virginia’s current approach to rural painkiller prescriptions is a good start: have just one anesthesiologist treat and prescribe for the patients in pain – do the rounds -- when it comes to these physically addicting opioids. That way just one doctor could get more clues as to whether or not he is dealing with an addict.

At a larger, more societal level, we need to decide something really basic about pain management: is any physically addicting substances that gives one a buzz really healthy in the long run? We need to have insurers more automatically cover alternative therapies, such as acupuncture, to get people to handle their pain, including emotional pain for PTSD, instead of marijuana. We need more physical therapy where it can really alleviate the pain, and less chemical therapy. We need to have regular MDs spend more time guiding patients in intense pain instead of saying “take two pain pills and call me in the morning.”

At the level of others in the household, we need a culture that is more accepting of an addicted family member in severe, chronic pain, and more attention and caring, instead of suing the doctor in our culture of quick-fix expectations after an overdose (how do we know it wasn’t suicide?).

Yeah, a lawsuit can be brought mainly because that will bring a lot of money into the family’s coffers, when it is often the family to blame for a sensitive, bullied, abused family member becoming an addict in the first place, not his doctor.

Arun Ahuja

UNM student