Opioid Epidemic: Why Are We in So Much Pain?

The opioid epidemic is staggering! Opioid overdose deaths soared to over 200 percent since 2000, and at least 91 Americans die each day from an opioid OD! No wonder President Trump just declared it a public health emergency. Today's guests, Dr. Alexis Carayannopoulos and Dr. Joseph Audette, are top addiction and pain medicine experts. We follow them into the complex world of painkillers, patients, physicians and prescriptions to understand how things began spinning out of control and became the crisis it is today. You'll hear how the pendulum in medicine has changed: from doctors being encouraged to be more generous with pain meds so that patients didn't suffer to their now being encouraged to withhold pain meds - and Big Brother government is counting every pill. The crisis has gotten so bad that even dogs are almost dying because of inadvertently sniffing opioids and requiring the antidote Narcan to survive.