OVERPRESCRIBED: America's Habit of Overprescribing - from Antibiotics to Opioids

OVERPRESCRIBED: America's Habit of Overprescribing - from Antibiotics to Opioids

The five subjects listed at the top of the whitehouse.gov webpage are economy, national security, budget, immigration, and the opioid crisis. Indeed, dependence, misuse, and overprescription of painkillers is a public health threat. According to The Atlantic, in 2016, 64,000 people died from drug overdoses in the U.S., most of them due to opioids. That’s more than the number of Americans killed in the wars in Vietnam and Iraq combined. Opioids, however, are not the only drugs that can have significant and lasting public heath effects. Seemingly more innocuous medications like antibiotics have been similarly exhausted. Many have become ineffective in treating a range of illnesses from minor colds to fatal infections, promoting drug resistance in previously manageable and curable conditions. Today, at least 30 percent of antibiotics prescribed in the United States are unecessary, according to the Journal of…