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IPFS News Link • Healthcare Industry

Civilian Casualties Continue to Mount in Governments' War on Opioids

• cato.org By Jeffrey A. Singer

The policies have dramatically reduced opioid prescribing by health care practitioners and have pressured them into rapidly tapering or cutting off their chronic pain patients from the opioids that have allowed them to function. More and more reports appear in the press about patients becoming desperate because their doctors, often fearing they may lose their livelihoods if they are seen as "outliers" by surveillance agencies, under-treat their pain or abruptly cut them off of their pain treatment regimen.

story in the July 23, Louisville (KY) Courier Journal illustrates the harm this is causing in Kentucky. "Doctors say the federal raids on medical clinics lead to unintended consequences — patients thrust into painful withdrawals and left vulnerable to suicide or dangerous street drugs," states the article.  Dr. Wayne Tuckerson, President of the Greater Louisville Medical Society, said, "[When investigators] go in with a sledgehammer and shut down a practice without consulting community physicians, suddenly we have patients thrown loose." He went on to say, "Docs are very much afraid when it comes to writing pain medications…We don't want patients to become addicted. And we don't want to have our licenses — and therefore our livelihoods — at stake." And if pharmacists in the area learn of a police raid or investigation of a medical practice—regardless of the outcome of that investigation—many of them refuse to fill legal prescriptions presented by patients of those practitioners.


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