> But actual addiction also exists, and it's more dangerous and more likely to happen.
Not sure that's obvious, or true. The article itself recounts two situations where the patients denied meds they needed became suicidal, and a third where if the patient hadn't pushed the issue to get his meds (insulin), he would have died.
Yeah, I was wondering who would call me out on that! I'm not aware of any good studies that compare addiction vs. pseudo-addiction.
It's definitely not obvious, because a lot of doctors were convinced to the contrary.
By the way -- I'm not saying those individuals in the article aren't important, but whitewashed "case studies" that are full of snark and biased language and have no sources or timeframes, are not the best sources of evidence. In particular, the "pain management" space is rapidly evolving in the US and without timeframes, many of those anecdotes have negative utility.
I'm not saying "pseudoaddiction" doesn't exist, obviously, but we need statistical arguments that are more nuanced than "does it exist or not."
edit: I'm realizing that my understanding of this debate is out of date. So I'd like to apologize if my stance seems insensitive to what's going on right now w.r.t. opioid prescriptions. My gut feeling is that addiction is a bigger problem, but that varies depending on how freely opioids are prescribed. If opioids are under-prescribed then pseudoaddiction becomes a larger problem, for sure. Being dumb, I just assumed they were still being over-prescribed...
Not sure that's obvious, or true. The article itself recounts two situations where the patients denied meds they needed became suicidal, and a third where if the patient hadn't pushed the issue to get his meds (insulin), he would have died.