Think you'd know for sure if one of your patients abused prescription drugs or sold them? Think again.
"Every doctor's been fooled, I guarantee it. Guarantee every single doctor out there that's written prescriptions has been fooled," Brian Durkin, D.O., who runs the Center for Pain Management at Stonybrook Medicine on Long Island, New York, recently told NPR in an interview about the epidemic of prescription painkiller abuse and doctor shopping.
Although most states now have prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMP) that physicians can use to access a patient's prescription history, most doctors don't use the tool unless it's mandatory, as it became in New York last summer. And Durkin told NPR he's amazed by what he's learned since first accessing the database.
Notably, he's discovered that people who divert pills often don't fit the stereotype of a typical drug dealer. "It's not so much jittery people or young people," he said. "I've had 60-, 65-year-old people that turned out to be not taking the drugs that I prescribed, that you would never think were, you know, out there selling drugs."
PDMPs are likely physicians' best tool for battling this crisis, Andrew Kolodny, M.D., chief medical officer of Phoenix House, an addiction treatment organization, and cofounder of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing, told NPR. "If you were going to be prescribing a dangerous drug, taking two minutes to make sure that that patient hasn't been receiving it from other prescribers is worthwhile," he said. "And, unfortunately, if we don't make it mandatory, doctors are just not going to do it."
Indeed, PDMP use in Kentucky and Tennessee has more than doubled since it became mandatory, NPR noted, adding that the number of prescriptions for painkillers dropped by roughly 10 percent in Kentucky.
There are reasons some physicians object to making PDMPs mandatory, however. For example, Art Rousseau, M.D., a psychiatrist and chair of the legislative affairs committee at the Oklahoma State Medical Association, told NPR that he's concerned about doctors spending valuable time running checks on patients who are clearly in pain. "And if the process is too cumbersome," Rousseau says, "some doctors might decide not to prescribe opioids at all."
To learn more:
- read the transcript