The American Medical Association’s new training on pain management arrived in the midst of a burgeoning crisis. It was September 2007, and doctors were prescribing enough opioid painkillers each year for every American adult to have a bottle of the addictive pills. Overdoses were at a historic high and showed no signs of slowing down. Just four months earlier, executives at Purdue Pharma had pleaded guilty to felony charges for misleading regulators and physicians about the dangers of OxyContin.

In light of this news, one might have expected the AMA—the prestigious organization that bills itself as the “unified voice” of America’s doctors dedicated to “the art and science of medicine and the betterment of public health”—to bring attention to the crisis in its newly updated continuing education course on how to treat pain.

Instead, the 12-module training suggested that doctors were still too tentative about prescribing narcotics. “The effectiveness of opioid therapy may be undermined by misconceptions about their risks, particularly risks associated with abuse and addiction,” read materials from one session. The class included ideas like “pseudoaddiction,” referring to when pain patients seem “inappropriately drug seeking,” but aren’t truly addicted—rather, they just […]