Marty Makary on Opioid Overprescribing: warns against

In Blind Spots (2024), in the chapter “Silicone Valley: Breast implants, autoimmune diseases, and the opioid crisis,” Dr. Marty Makary warns that experts who insisted opioids were not addictive ignited the opioid crisis. Summaries of the book confirm he treats the opioid catastrophe as a case of expert consensus overriding caution.

Makary’s stated reasoning is that the medical establishment’s reassurances about opioid safety were a form of dogma — decreed by authority rather than grounded in evidence — and that the resulting overprescribing caused a public-health disaster. He presents it as the most tragic example of his broader warning about medical groupthink.

This is Makary’s position, attributed to him.

This page chronicles a stated position of the person above. It is not medical advice and not the site's own conclusion.