Addiction hits 30 doctors a year

Published on Saturday 15 March 2008 18:46

UP TO 30 Scottish doctors each year are turning to counselling for addiction to alcohol and drugs.

A leading support group for the medical profession has revealed the extent of the problem of addiction among the country's doctors.

Alasdair Young, of the British Doctors and Dentists Support Group, said the main problem suffered by doctors approaching his group was alcohol but increasing numbers were addicted to illegal drugs including cocaine and heroin.

He said: "Doctors are less likely nowadays to dishonestly prescribe themselves drugs like Valium. There are more checks on these drugs nowadays and a chemist would spot this fairly quickly.

"There is also a lot of heroin, cocaine and ecstasy going on among young people and doctors are human too.

Over the past few years the proportion of doctors coming to our organisation with addictions to street drugs has increased from 1% to 10%. However alcohol is the most common addiction among doctors."

Young's support group works in a similar way to Alcoholics Anonymous, organising local meetings for doctors to get together and talk about their problems. It keeps its information confidential and relies on protocols within the NHS to pick up problems with drug or alcohol addicted doctors at work.

But experts said the real prevalence of addictions among the medical profession could be three times higher than known numbers because many doctors would not think their drinking or drug taking was a problem.

Rowdy Yates, an addictions expert in the Scottish Addiction Studies Group at Stirling University, said: "If this group is seeing 30% of problematic cases they are doing pretty well. There will be a proportion of doctors out there who think they are drinking a bit too much but not enough to worry about and there will be some who are using drugs to get them through a bad patch."