A doctor's thoughts on the opioid epidemic and pain management | Anna Lembke | TEDxStanford

NOTE FROM TED: Please do not look to this talk for medical advice. We've flagged this talk, which was filmed at an independent TEDx event, because it appears to fall outside TEDx's content guidelines. This talk only represents the speaker’s personal opinions on pain, opioids, and addiction and are not supported by sufficient scientific evidence. The guidelines we give our TEDx organizers are described in more detail here: http://storage.ted.com/tedx/manuals/t...


Not long ago, Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke would refuse to treat anyone who used opioids, believing that there wasn’t much she could do until they stopped abusing the addictive painkiller. Since researching and writing her new book, “Drug Dealer, M.D.,” she has come to a very different way of thinking and understanding of how doctors themselves have been acting as drug dealers.

Dr. Lembke received her undergraduate degree in Humanities from Yale University and her medical degree from Stanford University School of Medicine. She completed a residency in Psychiatry, and a fellowship in mood disorders, both at Stanford, and is currently Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. She has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles, chapters, and commentaries, and is author of the book: Drug Dealer, MD: How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It’s So Hard to Stop (Johns Hopkins University Press, November 2016).

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