Hershel Jick

Hershel Jick is an American medical researcher and Associate Professor of Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine, where he was formerly the director of the Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program. He graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1956. He is known for researching the negative and positive effects of pharmaceutical drugs. For instance, a 1977 study by him and his assistant, Jane Porter, reported that no more than 1 patient per 3,600 died because of incorrect drug prescriptions. He is also the author of the book A Listener's Guide to Mozart's Music. In 1980, Jick and Porter published the letter "Addiction Rare in Patients Treated With Narcotics", which has been cited to argue that opioids are rarely addictive. Jick himself has said that this study had multiple limitations, such as that it only pertained to patients in the hospital, and did not assess the risk of addiction when opioids were prescribed in outpatient settings.