The United States has seen an increase in both nonmedical use of painkillers and prescription drug-related deaths. Researchers say that "doctor shopping" bears some of the blame.
A recent study found that 5.2 million people reported using prescription painkillers for nonmedical purposes in the past month. Meanwhile, the nationwide number of accidental drug poisoning deaths has risen 68 percent.
Researchers studying the deaths from those overdoses found that more than half of the people who died did not have legal prescriptions for the drugs, and more than 20 percent had engaged in "doctor shopping" -- they had 5 or more different physicians prescribing them medications over the last year of their life.