“We Started It”: Atul Gawande on Doctors’ Role in the Opioid Epidemic

September 11, 2017

(Vox) – I asked Gawande to weigh in on a question I hadn’t seen him discuss elsewhere: What role did doctors and professional medicine play in the proliferation of opioids?  “We started it,” Gawande told me flatly. He argued that health providers are at the root of the country’s staggering opioid epidemic. He didn’t blame the pharmaceutical companies — although there is good evidence that they played a large role — but instead focused on how views of pain began to shift in the 1990s, with doctors urged to take their patients’ suffering more seriously.