Hershel Jick, MD, co-author of a one-paragraph letter to the New England Journal of Medicine in 1980, says he regrets that the inaccurate representation of his words has contributed to the current nationwide opioid epidemic, NPR reports.
"This has recently been a matter of a lot of angst for me," Dr. Jick told Morning Edition host David Greene. "We have published nearly 400 papers on drug safety, but never before have we had one that got into such a bizarre and unhealthy situation."
The letter, written by Dr. Jick and his assistant Jane Porter of the Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program at Boston University Medical Center, said that based off analysis of nearly 12,000 hospitalized patients who received at least one dose of a narcotic painkiller, "only four cases of reasonably well documented addiction" occurred "in patients who had no history of addiction," according to the report. They concluded that addiction to narcotics was rare in patients who had no prior history of addiction.
According to an article published earlier this month in the same journal, inaccurate representations of Dr. Jick's letter led to a significant increase in the prescribing of opioids for chronic pain. David Juurlink, MD, PhD, who authored the recent letter, found more than 600 citations of Dr. Jick's letter, many of which "grossly misrepresented the conclusions of the letter," according to NPR.
"We believe that this citation pattern contributed to the North American opioid crisis by helping to shape a narrative that allayed prescribers' concerns about the risk of addiction associated with long-term opioid therapy," Dr. Juurlink and co-authors wrote.