This “open letter by healthcare professionals” calls for specialist NHS services to support patients harmed by taking prescription medications. Published in the British Medical Journal, the letter begins:
“This week, BBC1’s Panorama drew sharp attention to the problem of prescribed drug dependence and withdrawal in the United Kingdom, providing insight into an iatrogenic problem affecting large numbers of people internationally. While this has been a problem for decades, the Panorama programme shows that there are still almost no NHS services to support patients who have been harmed by taking medicines as prescribed by their doctor, such as antidepressants and benzodiazepines. In the absence of these services, the programme detailed how patients experiencing severe and prolonged withdrawal symptoms have resorted to online peer groups for validation, support, and safe drug tapering advice. The patient community, it seems, has been forced to develop its own withdrawal protocols (e.g. for antidepressants) in the absence of sufficient tapering guidance being advanced by NICE (The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) or any other national clinical guidelines internationally.12
The scale of the prescribed drug dependence and withdrawal problem in England was revealed in 2019, when Public Health England (PHE) published a comprehensive evidence review of dependence forming drugs.3 It showed that 26% of the adult population in the England was prescribed a dependence forming drug in the previous year, for example, antidepressants, benzodiazepines, Z-drugs, GABA-ergic and opioids, and that there are substantial levels of unnecessary prescribing of these drugs in the community (i.e. prescribing beyond what clinical guidelines advise, and/or for indications where there is no clear evidence of efficacy). Such unnecessary prescribing has recently been estimated to cost the NHS in England over £500 million each year in medicines, consultation, and pharmacy dispensing costs alone,4 before considering the adverse side effects of these medications on people’s health and wellbeing. This adds a significant economic burden to the likely mounting disability cost of patients suffering the effects of severe and protracted withdrawal …”
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