Steep Climb In Benzodiazepine Prescribing By Primary Care Doctors

Steep Climb In Benzodiazepine Prescribing By Primary Care Doctors

January 25, 2019

 

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/01/25/688287824/steep-climb-in-benzodiazepine-prescribing-by-primary-care-doctors

 

"I am concerned that our national focus on opioids has hidden the problem related to benzodiazepines — that's our next frontier," says Dr. Joanna Starrels, as associate professor at the department of medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

 

"Generally speaking, primary care physicians have not received the training that they need to prescribe medications that have such high risk for addiction or overdose," says Starrels.

 

Lembke notes that the biggest rise in outpatient visits that led to benzodiazepine prescriptions were from primary care physicians and not psychiatrists.

 

"I think the big message here is that primary care doctors are really left with burden of dealing, not only with chronic pain and opioid prescription, but also benzodiazepine prescriptions," she says.

 

The trends, she adds, reflect "the incredible burden of care on primary care physicians, who are given little time, or resources" to handle a high volume of pain patients with complex conditions.

 

"That's partly what got us into the opioid epidemic in the first place," Lembke notes.

 

Note:  Article is a year old but saw our good friend Dr. Lembke is quoted here.

        ~ Interesting dichotomy of statements .... come to your own conclusions.

   

     

Good to see this part:

 

Physicians who want to move patients off their long-term use of benzodiazepines should do it slowly over time, Starrels cautions. "It has to be slow and medically monitored over time," she says, because "sudden withdrawal can be fatal."

 

She says primary care doctors should get better guidelines for prescribing these drugs, just as there are CDC guidelines for opioid prescription.

 

"People have started calling this 'our other prescription drug problem' — the first one being opioids, but this one's flying under the radar," Agarwal says. "It would be great if we address it before it becomes an epidemic — if there isn't already one."

"It would be great if we address it before it becomes an epidemic — if there isn't already one."[/i]

 

No doubt it has been a "silenced" epidemic for a long time...... how, when & who is going to address it

is the real question.  Maybe the "Medicating Normal" project will be the catalyst for change.... but...

its such an unbelievable "David & Goliath" match-up that .... well.... we can only hope. 

It does seem to me that there's more and more awareness out there, but still, the problem has been around for so many years. This meds have been out since the 1960s, and there have undoubtedly been issues since that time.