Against Against Pseudoaddiction
Devil's advocate position (mostly from a book, "Dreamland", about this topic):<p>"Pseudoaddiction" is deliberately defined such that it's indistinguishable from actual addiction. The concept was popularized by Purdue Pharma, who were trying to market OxyContin.<p>At the time, providers were averse to prescribing opioids because of addiction concerns. Purdue created the "pseudoaddiction" term to teach providers that just because someone looks addicted, you can keep prescribing them opioids anyways.<p>At the same time, they lied with statistics to tell doctors that opioids only caused "true" addiction in less than 1% of cases.<p>Thus, the brunt of the message was that if you see addiction, there's a 99% chance that it's <i>not real addiction</i>.<p>Many doctors were convinced. Now the nation is dealing with an opioid epidemic driven by OxyContin.<p>Pseudoaddiction exists. But actual addiction also exists, and it's more dangerous and more likely to happen. Being afraid to diagnose "addiction" because of "pseudoaddiction", is just FUD.