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Podcast: The Future of Everything
Episode: Anna Lembke: How do we fight the disease of addiction?
Description: Beginning in the 1980s, medical doctors started treating pain with increasing amounts of opioid medications.
That shift was driven in part by an effort by the profession to be more humane to those in serious pain, but also by misinformation and aggressive marketing by the pharmaceutical industry, which wrongly convinced doctors that their drugs were both safe and not addictive.
According to Anna Lembke, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, those changes wrought the current opioid crisis in which millions are addicted to heroin-like medications and many more are dead from overdoses caused...