By any metric, opioid-related overdoses in the United States have reached epidemic proportions. Many intertwined causes have led to this crisis, from reduced access to substance-abuse treatment, to increased unemployment spurring use of prescription opioids, to online pharmacies that illegally supply prescription opioids to patients.

But health care providers are also widely held responsible for overprescribing prescription opioids. While research testing this hypothesis is mixed, it’s clear that efforts to curb the epidemic need to involve physicians and hospitals. The adoption of prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) is one such effort that holds promise, though it must be made more effective.

Whether opioids are truly overprescribed is difficult to tease out, because pain is hard to objectively quantify, as is the amount of pain relief that patients may receive from opioids. Patients and doctors have recently raised concerns over pain being undertreated due to greater scrutiny causing a decline in opioid prescriptions.

Nevertheless, rates of prescribing are still very high, and opioid-related overdose deaths continue to rise. By some estimates, more than 50% of opioid pills are unused by the patients who are prescribed them after surgery, which suggests significant overprescribing exists.

Read the full article about health care providers and overprescription of opioids by Anupam B. Jena, Michael Barnett, and Dana Goldman at Brookings.