Guidelines highlight opioid dependence in children, indicating that pediatricians should distinguish between addiction and therapeutic use.
The American Academy of Pediatrics released a report this summer on how pediatricians can tell if children are “addicted” to opioids. We use the scare quotes because the report is not about addiction, which involves the behavior of seeking out drugs for reward, but about dependence, which occurs both in addiction and in therapeutic use of addictive medications — in this case, opioids.
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Alison Knopf (2025) studied this question.
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