Opioid crisis fueled by prescriptions from family doctors and internists

In a study published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, Chen and three colleagues found that the majority of opioid painkillers aren't being prescribed by a small group of bad doctors. Rather, they discovered that a huge number of those drugs are coming from run-of-the-mill family doctors and general practitioners. In a time when opioid addiction has become an epidemic, these kinds of numbers could prove important for health care professionals to understand their role in the crisis. "You can't just blame a handful of pain doctors," said Chen. "All of us are part of this problem whether we want to admit it or not."