“Gambling disorder is the hidden addiction. You can't smell it. You can't taste it. You can't see it. You can't have a urine drug test.”
Chasing Life · Health & Longevity · November 2026
Context
Sanjay Gupta admitted medicine teaches little about gambling addiction. Timothy Fong explains why it so often goes unnoticed, before describing a young patient who lost $250,000 in two years on betting apps.
Transcript
…Because now they're not athletes. They're not heroes. They're not people to cheer on. They're what? They're numbers. They're commodities. They're just material objects for my personal gain. And I think that's functionally a huge loss of what we see in American culture as it comes to gambling.
Doc, walk us through maybe someone who went from just having fun to needing help. What did their family or friends notice first about maybe their behavior or how they were acting when it came to watching sports?
And phenomenal question. And again, Dr. Gupta, I heard you say, well, I don't know too much about this because we don't teach about this in medical school or residency. Why? Because gambling, addiction, gambling disorder is the hidden addiction. You can't smell it. You can't taste it. You can't see it. You can't have a urine drug test. So if I had 100 men and women with gambling disorder coming to the clinic, I'm going to get 100 different stories. The bottom line is this: the continued ongoing gambling creates some sort of harm to their lives and they continue to gamble. So it's going to be common things like depression, financial strain, lying, not sleeping, physical stress, psychological stress. Suicidal thoughts, a whole…
Who are we talking about here, Professor? Who's the most likely demographic to be affected by this?
Literally any single human on earth. If you breathe, if you eat, and you get into it, if you do anything in the world of financial risk, you can develop addiction. However, we know that there are some very clear risk factors. Of course, anyone with a past active substance use disorder, anyone with…
You know, I just, I just got to say again, just for the podcast, this is a topic that I just did not know that much about. And, you know, I have three daughters. They are 21, 19, and 17. So maybe that's part of it in terms of why it didn't hit my radar as hard. But this growth and what has happened…
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