Lindsay Lohan may not be to blame for all her prescription meds
By Dr. Bradley Frederick
HollywoodNews.com: TMZ reports that Lindsay Lohan has prescriptions for multiple medications including Zoloft for panic attacks and depression, Trazodone for Anti-depression, Adderall for ADHD- attention deficit hyperaction disorder, Nexium for GERD or intestinal hyper acidity and most disturbingly she is taking Dilaudid or hyroMorphine for pain management; what kind of pain, we don’t know.
We do know that Dilaudid is about 10 times stronger than Vicodine and when used with over the counter anti-histamines the Dilaudid effects are further amplified. Dilaudid is part of a family of drugs called Opioids which is the number one abused group of drugs according to the NIDA, National Institute on Drug Abuse.
TMZ’s source said Ms. Lohan also goes to multiple doctors. This is called doctor shopping, because when one doctor writes a limited prescription of a controlled substance like Dilaudid, the patient simply goes to another doctor to get more of the same prescription; thus resulting in the patient taking larger amounts of the drug than is safe or recommended. Furthermore it results in patients often taking drugs that should not be mixed because one physician doesn’t know what the other physician has prescribed. This often results in very serious adverse results and even death.
The statistics of people doctor shopping, getting multiple prescriptions and dying are very alarming and it is not just celebrities. Certainly everyone knows of Michael Jackson, Anna Nicole Smith, Heath Ledger, Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Lee, Freddie Prinze, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley’s prescription drug problems that lead to their deaths.
However, prescription medication abuse in the United States has reached epidemic proportions. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), their past National Survey on Drug Abuse indicated that the abuse of prescription drugs is rising rapidly in the United States. In fact, almost 3 million young people aged 12 to 17 had used prescription medications non-medically.
The problem is so widespread that a study on students in Wisconsin and Minnesota revealed 34 percent of the kids with ADHD had been approached to sell or trade their Adderall, another of Lohan’s medications.
The bigger problem is once someone gets used to taking prescription pills of any kind, it is very easy to fall in to the addictive trap of taking narcotic pain killers, prescription sleeping pills and other addictive drugs.
Drug addiction is a biological pathological process that alters how the brain functions. The fundamental and long lasting effects are a major component of addiction. The line between drug abuser and drug addict are so amazingly close that we as a society must find a way to keep this prescription abuse from occurring.
Award News, Breaking News, Entertainment News, Movie News, Music News, Hollywood News
2 Comments
And this is why EMR/EHR implementation is so important – that way, no matter WHO your patient is, the prescriber can look up prescriptions and not overprescribe.
This is important information that changes the way we think about Lohan’s case. Even if she weren’t doctor-shopping, even if she received this regimen from a solo practitioner who was carefully regulating the medications, she would be intoxicated, basically, at all times. With doctor-shopping, it’s straight-up polysubstance abuse.
This regimen is not compatible with her recovery, but, in a sense, her prognosis may be better. Poly-substance, at least, is a nice discrete target, and recovery might reveal a different, (likely much healthier) Ms. Lohan.