‘She Trusted Me, and I’d Turned Her Away’

Physician wracked with guilt after losing patient to overdose

https://www.medpagetoday.com/blogs/themethodsman/71172

Audrey Provenzano, MD, MPH, a primary care physician in Chelsea, Mass., avoided getting the waiver needed to prescribe buprenorphine (Suboxone), and so was unable to treat an opioid-addicted patient who subsequently died of an overdose. She wrote about this experience in a moving piece appearing Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

We discussed that story, medicine’s stormy history with opioid abuse, and the politics of the buprenorphine “waiver” in a Doc-to-Doc video conversation.

One Response

  1. This has nothing to do with the chronic pain patient.

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