By ALICE YINOriginal Source: nytimes.com

Doctors and patients are supposed to share a therapeutic alliance. This agreement hinges on trust and respect. But what happens when that trust breaks down because of addiction? In a recent On Medicine column, Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee writes about a patient he treated early in his career, whose deceptions to obtain opioids pulled him into a patient-doctor relationship that he eventually describes as “mutual assured destruction.”

Mukherjee’s struggle with his patient continues a conversation in the medical community on the difficulties and misconceptions of treating opioid-addicted patients. Over 100 physicians and other health care professionals...click here to continue reading