AMA welcomes CDC’s revised view on opioids guidelines
“The AMA appreciates that the CDC recognizes that patients in pain require individualized care and that the agency’s 2016 guidelines on opioids have been widely misapplied. The guidelines have been treated as hard and fast rules, leaving physicians unable to offer the best care for their patients.”
I have stated many times before that it would appear that many practitioners and healthcare corporations have decided that they had a favorite sentence, paragraph or page out of the 90 odd pages of the CDC opiate dosing guidelines and they used that verbiage to profess that they were following the CDC guidelines.
Just whose responsibility is it for these guidelines being widely mis-applied ? Was it the DEA going from office to office admonishing prescribers about not adhering to these guidelines… I have heard quotes of DEA agents going into a practice and telling the prescriber that the prescriber’s pts were not being weaned FAST ENOUGH and another statement that a prescriber was told that the prescriber would not “look good in orange”.
Could the legal dept of many of these healthcare corporations have taken the position to CYA the corporation and thus suggesting to whatever part of the corporation would believe that they have the authority to create corporate policies and procedures to mandate how – or if – pts with pain are treated ?
Let’s consider some hypotheticals , could the misapplication of the guidelines be consider MALPRACTICE ?
Could the using of these opiate dosing conversion programs that all have same/similar foot notes warning that the results produced by these prgms are CRUDE ESTIMATES AT BEST and not to be used as black/white answers… but as a starting point to titrate the pt’s pain management meds to optimize the pt’s pain management an quality of life. In fact here are some parts of the CDC guidelines that appear to reinforce this:
Here is four quotes from the CDC opiates guidelines:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/65/rr/rr6501e1.htm
“The guideline is intended to ensure that clinicians and patients consider safer and more effective treatment, improve patient outcomes such as reduced pain and improved function.”
“Clinicians should consider the circumstances and unique needs of each patient when providing care.”
“Clinical decision making should be based on a relationship between the clinician and patient, and an understanding of the patient’s clinical situation, functioning, and life context.”
“This guideline provides recommendations for primary care clinicians who are prescribing opioids for chronic pain outside of active cancer treatment, palliative care, and end-of-life care.”
What if a spouse has committed suicide because of having their pain medication reduced or taken away because of the misapplication of the CDC guidelines ? I made this post a few years back
Compensating The Spouse and Family of The Injured: Loss of Consortium Claims
Since I am not an attorney…. these hypotheticals could just be scratching the surface of the total number of potential legal/financial liabilities, it could all depend if it is a independent practitioner or a healthcare corporation. The first there could be several dozens of pts involved while the latter could there could be hundreds or thousands of pts involved. Of course, law firms will probably go after the deeper pockets and the most pts being harm first.
Filed under: General Problems
It won’t be easy but it has to be done. May have to file tort claims against government but there’s a lot of wrongdoers.
There are various degrees of harm but I can’t imagine a larger group of victims in US history.
The group who wrote the guidelines can blame the DEA and claim they were misunderstood but they are responsible… gross negligence at the very least. It’s well documented they were aware of patient harm from the start and did nothing to help for 3 years.
Some prescribers should as well. Especially those who were punished for doing their job and never even charged.
I contacted 7 attorneys regarding these issues not one of them were interested in pursuing litigation, none could see a way to prove claims of injury even though in my case the tapering led to an injury, hospitalization and surgery. No case law in light of these new guidelines, so it will take some deep pockets willing to litigate for an extended period of time with some wins before other attorneys are willing to take chances.
I too have been looking for a lawyer but have not been successful
The AMA making a public statement about this just proves again that it is irrelevant what the CDC says about the guidelines, because it isn’t the problem. The AMA wouldn’t speak out about the real problem because they are part of it.