Dr Brings Awareness of Opioid Addiction to the World with Rap
This story was picked up by BBC World News, which looks at trending stories from around the week.
Dr Zubin Demania is a practising internal medicine doctor in the USA who is using songs and raps to raise awareness of the dangers of addiction to pharmaceutical drugs. As ZDoggMD he has 10s of millions of views on Facebook with such songs as ‘Big Pharma’ or ‘Treat Yourself.’ It is great that something like this is going viral, it is bringing attention to this epidemic in the U.S. and raising awareness in countries like Britain, hopefully enabling us to do something about it before we reach epidemic proportions.
Dr Demania stated that the U.S. doctors are so risk averse and there are so many pressures from the business side that in order to really say what he was thinking he felt he needed to create this other persona, who could say the things that he couldn’t say in his clinic. And his message… well, it is the problem of opioid addiction in the U.S., more than 28,000 Americans died in the USA in 2014 from opioids.
As we know the opioids are prescribed for chronic or acute physical conditions. This then leads to addiction and further effort to find opioids, which can then lead to heroin.
The interview with Dr Demania shed some light on the cause of this problem from the view of the healthcare practitioner.
They are judged in health care on patient satisfaction and the scores that patients give if they don’t make the patient happy then that is negative for the doctor. If the patient comes in, in pain and the doctor prescribes narcotics then they will leave and give the doctor a 5/5. The other issue is that the government has been pushing pain as a vital score, and when patients come in, the doctor has to ask ‘what is your level of pain from 1-10?’ and if the patient says 7 or above the doctor HAS to treat that pain and the patients have expectations that their pain will be 0, but in a lot of cases that is really impossible and so the vicious cycle is started; with doctors overprescribing medication, patients expecting the drugs and doctors being rewarded for giving them out.
The market for prescription painkillers is now billions and big pharma is making a lot of money from them. There was a major investigation done by the Associated Press and the Centre for Public Integrity and it revealed that extortionate sums of money had been spent by pharmaceutical companies on lobbying and campaign contributions over the last decade. So, in fact, they have actually been trying to stall government action on this problem.
What is being done about it? Well in truth not a lot yet, but congress has passed some laws making it harder to prescribe opioids and this week has been dubbed ‘prescription opioid and heroin epidemic awareness week’. There is also pressure being put on congress to free up a billion dollars for treatment programmes.
ZDoggMD says that those responsible should be sent to jail as they are in fact crooks. More data from Dr Demania is that the pharmaceutical companies know that their public image is tainted and that it is in their best interest to support the rational prescribing of opioids and narcotics… but whether or not that will happen is to be seen.
You can see some of ZDoggMD videos and use them to raise awareness of the problem. Because what starts in the US rarely stays there.
