The opioid crisis has reached a fever pitch as Surgeon General Jerome Adams is on the record stating,"The call to action is to … keep within reach, know how to use naloxone.” on NPR’s Morning Edition. By issuing this advisory for more people to become familiar with the overdose-reversing drug Naloxone, the Surgeon General is acknowledging the fact that in many parts of the country use of Naloxone by first responders has become as ubiquitous as providing CPR. When considering pseudoscience, particularly C.P Snow’s focus the “gulf of mutual incomprehension” between the humanities and sciences, there is no better current example than how pharmaceutical marketing lead to the misinformation about opioid addictiveness, overprescription opioids, and …show more content…
It was believed any amount of opioid analgesic would produce addicts, leading to an pain being left untreated. Pain advocates worked to dispel prevailing myths about pain building character, babies and the non-verbal not feeling pain, but they also worked to discredit those who were concerned with the addictiveness of these drugs. Even as Dahl found studies that claimed opioid addiction rates were around one percent, it was a clear deviation from scientific literature of that time. As this field of study’s research has become more robust is extremely clear even with “responsible” usage addiction rates are as high as ten percent. Regardless, Dahl and her peers pushed the safety of opioids like OxyContin even as recently as a few years ago, with Professor Dahl maintaining “opioid and heroin deaths are a small percentage of the population, and the media largely ignore the broader crisis of undertreated pain”. In 2014, there were a reported sixteen thousand deaths attributed to opioid overdose, now opioid overdose involved deaths surpass the number of people who die from breast cancer every year. At this point, it is clearly recognized that opioids have been overprescribed to patients dealing with pain. The important point to make here is the first recommendations towards …show more content…
Or at the very least not at all as effective as they are advertised. This revelation is becoming clearer as more long-term studies are being conducted in the wake of this epidemic. There are now clear indications that the assumptions about the effectiveness of opioids need to be revisited as smaller studies have shown that depending of the kind of pain being treated and on whom, opioids may actually make pain worse. It has gotten to the point that as of this year the FDA will now require drug companies to conduct research that shows with specificity how effective the opioids that they are selling are for particular kinds of pain treatment before they can market themselves for those treatments. This research is critical for drug abuse advocates because it makes concrete the ambiguous risk-benefit analysis at the heart of pain treatment involving