Over Prescribing

This is a very extensive report on the over-prescribing of prescriptions. In many of the cases listed below you can see that 1 of 3 things is happening...

1. People are in dire need of the many prescriptions being made
2. People are Hoarding the prescriptions, or
3. People are selling the drugs

You can decide what you think, but this double edged sword battle is an ongoing major conflict in the chemical dependency counseling world, at the moment. If you want to read the full report scroll to the bottom and follow the Source Link.

"Twice, the patient, a man in his mid-30s, said he lost his prescriptions for Valium and Percocet. Once, he said he was in a car accident that scattered his pills on the road. Another time, he said the medicine he was first prescribed was no good, so he "returned the pills." Another time, his wife called and said their house had been "searched by authorities" and the medicine had gone missing.

Each time, no matter the story, Peter S. Trent or Hampton J. Jackson Jr., doctors at the same orthopedic practice in Oxon Hill, refilled the prescription, according to the Maryland Board of Physicians. Over the course of 21/2 years, the doctors gave the patient 275 prescriptions, mostly for Percocet, a powerful, highly addictive painkiller.

Sometimes they wrote the patient more than one prescription for the drug on the same day. In a single month, they wrote him 11 prescriptions for Percocet, totaling 734 pills.

Jackson and Trent - who maintain that they did nothing wrong - are among a small group of doctors who were the top prescribers of tightly regulated drugs in their state Medicaid programs, according to a Washington Post analysis of state data.

In one case, he noted, a Florida doctor wrote nearly 97,000 prescriptions for mental-health drugs over a 21-month period.

The Post's analysis found not only that certain doctors routinely prescribe some medications far more than their peers, but also that some of them have a long history of sanctions by professional disciplinary boards for unethical and unprofessional behavior, including overprescribing medications to patients who may have been using them to get high instead of well.

The state boards that oversee medical misconduct say overprescribing is a huge problem that they take very seriously.

The top priority is to do "whatever you think is necessary to protect the public," said William Harp, executive director of the Virginia Board of Medicine. "I want us to be very objective and very fair to these doctors and the citizens they treat."

Regulators say they are caught between trying to keep doctors from prescribing drugs unnecessarily and satisfying doctors who say heavy-handed investigations discourage them from prescribing medication that patients need.

Meanwhile, illicit use of prescription medicine has become the nation's "fastest-growing drug problem," according to R. Gil Kerlikowske, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Between 1999 and 2005, unintentional deaths from prescription drug overdose more than doubled, to more than 22,000, according to a study funded by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, making such overdoses the second-leading cause of unintentional death, after automobile accidents."

By Christian Davenport
Washington Post Staff Writer 
Saturday, January 1, 2011; 9:41 PM

Source:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...0102801_3.html

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