Earlier this week I was interviewed by a journalist writing a book about a doctor currently in prison convicted of a violation of the Controlled Substance Act.  I won’t divulge the doctor or the journalist, but I want to respond to one of his questions.

Bottom line from our interview, the journalist believes the propaganda that opioids cause addiction and that doctors in prison for prescribing have committed a crime, and unless he heard my message, his book will reflect that.

The question he had that I want to respond to publicly is:

What would you say to the victims of these doctors whose patients have died on their prescriptions? His insinuation was that my blog support of doctors criminalized by the government is a slap in the face of all of those relatives of addicts who used doctors to feed their addiction, and the deaths of those individuals is the doctor’s fault.

My reply was this:

When a patient comes to a doctor with a complaint of pain, we have to trust what the patient tells us. The doctor-patient relationship is based on trust, and when that trust is broken, there can be no doctor-patient relationship. So if an addict comes to a doctor and gives a history of pain to get drugs, we still have to believe their history.  When the doctor starts believing every patient with pain is a lying drug addict, they need to get out of the profession.

I don’t think you will ever see a patient go to a doctor and say “I have no pain. I just need a fix of hydrocodone to treat my addiction”. It’s a shame addicts can’t do that, because addiction is a disease just like diabetes or heart disease. But the 100 year/old government stand against treating addiction that way is still prevalent.

So what should a family member do if their loved one is lying to get drugs from a doctor?  Well, first let me tell you what not to do.

• You don’t call the doctor’s office and complain that so-and-so is a drug addict, and that’s the end of it. Doctors can’t take the comments over phones as justifiable reasons to disbelieve their patient.  That person on the phone could be lying, even about who they are.  They might be a disgruntled ex-spouse wanting to hurt the patient, or someone else just wanting to hurt them or play a prank on them.  So no respectable doctor would end a treatment plan based on a phone call complaint.

What you should do.

Immediate family member:

1. Accompany them to the doctor’s office on their appointment. Then, during the visit, explain why you think the patient is an addict. It is only with evaluating the pros and cons of the treatment plan that the doctor can make a decision. Even addicts can have pain and still need drugs. They would just need to have their addiction addressed at the same time.
2. If the patient knows you want to expose them, and refuses to allow you to accompany them, then show up at the office (planned with the doctor), so you can be added to the visit after the patient has been settled in to the exam room. Naturally this would be a confrontation, but that is often a useful procedure with an addict, called an intervention.
3. Conduct an intervention with the patient in your home, bringing in other family members to talk with him/her. https://healthyliferecovery.com/addiction-intervention/ is a source for how to do that.
4. Learn the REAL cause of drug abuse and addiction that I teach. There are several levels of learning.
   1. Free: Watch the 1 hour video on doctorsofcourage.org/videos/ by the name The REAL Cause of Drug Abuse.
   2. Buy the longer DVD
   3. Attend the ecourse Bringing Medicine to the 21^st Century. Once a person has attended the basic ecourse, they can then move on to a more individualized program just for addiction, and cure themselves of the disease in their own home.

All of these avenues give the answer to addiction. It’s just a matter of how easy it is to learn for the individual, and how much more individual attention you might need to understand the information. But once a person understands the cause of addiction—toxicity in the body—they have the way to reverse it and cure addiction and drug abuse.

Going to an AA or Al-Anon meeting, or even inpatient addiction centers will not cure addiction because they don’t get to the cause. That is why there is so much relapse of former addicts once they are back in their normal environment.

So, to family and friends of addicts who have used doctors to feed their addiction, the responsibility for their deaths is firs theirs, then yours, not the doctor’s.  I know, though, that you were probably coerced by the prosecution to testify against the doctor when you really knew that you were partially to blame, and that guilt is actually being misplaced on the doctor.

I hope that if you are a family member or friend to an addict currently using a doctor to get drugs, that you will get involved in the next ecourse I am offering in September, and get your addict friend to join, and save them from the potential death that their addiction could cause.

If you believe that the doctor caused an addiction by treating pain with opioids or any other condition with a controlled substance, you believe the government propaganda.  You need to learn the real cause of addiction, and stop believing the propaganda, so you can help yourself or your friend or family member to cure the addiction.

Feel free to respond to this post if you have testified against a doctor or feel the doctor is to blame, and I’ll try to respond to you. Just leave the doctor’s name/location off of your complaint, or I can edit it out myself.

Steve Ariens (Pharmacist Steve) sent me the following picture of an age-old editorial by a pharmacist to share.