# Pseudoaddiction **Pseudoaddiction** is a clinical-sounding term, coined in a 1989 case-report paper by David Haddox (who later joined [[Purdue Pharma]] as a medical director) and Travis Heit, that became a load-bearing piece of [[OxyContin]]'s marketing apparatus during the 1990s and 2000s. The concept: patients who appear to be addicts seeking more drugs may simply be **undertreated for pain**, and the correct clinical response to apparent drug-seeking behavior is to **increase** the opioid dose, not decrease it. The 1989 paper was a single case report — not a controlled study. No subsequent peer-reviewed evidence ever established the concept on a rigorous empirical basis. Despite this, "pseudoaddiction" was incorporated into Purdue training materials, pain-management continuing-medical-education programs (many of them Purdue-funded), and the broader 1990s pain-management movement. The term gave prescribing physicians an apparent scientific justification for keeping prescriptions escalating even when patients showed unambiguous addiction signals — early refill requests, dose-seeking behavior, evidence of diversion. By the late 2010s, the medical community had largely abandoned the concept. A 2015 review in *Current Addiction Reports* described it as "an empirically unfounded clinical construct." Haddox himself had defended the concept as recently as 2018. The pseudoaddiction story is a textbook case of how pharma-funded "medical concepts" can shape prescribing behavior at population scale without ever clearing the evidentiary bar that should govern medical knowledge. ## See Also - [[OxyContin]] — the drug whose marketing the concept supported - [[Purdue Pharma]] — the company - [[Opioid Crisis Timeline]] — Era 2 detail