F.D.A. Won’t Order Doctors to Get Pain-Drug Training [View all]

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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/10/health/fda-rejects-mandatory-training-in-painkillers-for-doctors.html?_r=1&src=recg
[div class="excerpt" style="border: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-bottom: none; border-radius: 0.3846em 0.3846em 0em 0em; box-shadow: 2px 2px 6px #bfbfbf;"]F.D.A. Won’t Order Doctors to Get Pain-Drug Training[div class="excerpt" style="border: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-top: none; border-radius: 0em 0em 0.3846em 0.3846em; background-color: #f4f4f4; box-shadow: 2px 2px 6px #bfbfbf;"]The Food and Drug Administration, overriding the advice of an expert panel, said Monday that it would not require doctors to have special training before they could prescribe long-acting narcotic painkillers that can lead to addiction.

But the agency said companies that make the drugs, like OxyContin, fentanyl and methadone, would be required to underwrite the cost of voluntary programs aimed at teaching doctors how to best use them.

The F.D.A. announcement came after several years of deliberations by the agency into the growing problem of prescription painkiller abuse and misuse. In 2010, a panel of outside experts assembled by the F.D.A. overwhelmingly rejected the agency’s proposal that physician training be voluntary.

Instead, that panel said that mandatory training was essential both to reduce the abuse of strong painkillers, or opioids and to make sure that pain patients were treated appropriately with them.

To paraphrase the old Mastercard commercials: "Cost to taxpayers? Priceless."

PB