The 
Medical Board of California has launched investigations into doctors who prescribed opioids to patients who, perhaps months or years later, fatally overdosed.
The effort, dubbed “the Death Certificate Project,” has sparked a conflict with physicians in California and beyond, in part because the doctors being investigated did not necessarily write the prescriptions leading to a death. The project is one of a kind nationally, although a much more limited program is operated by North Carolina’s board.
So far, the board has launched investigations into the practices of about 450 physicians and referred the names of 72 nurse practitioners, physician assistants and osteopathic physicians to their respective licensing boards.
To date, the regulators have formally accused at least 23 doctors of negligent prescribing, and more accusations are expected. Some of the accusations, like one 63-page document filed against Dr. Frank Gilman, a San Diego internist, detail hundreds of prescriptions for one patient over four years, most of them by him. Gilman did not respond to a request for comment.
Using terms such as “witch hunt” and “inquisition,” many doctors said the project is leading them or their peers to refuse patients’ requests for painkiller prescriptions — no matter how well documented the need — out of fear their practices will come under disciplinary review.
The project, first reported by MedPage Today, has struck a nerve among medical associations. Dr. Barbara McAneny, the American Medical Association president and an Albuquerque, N.M., oncologist whose cancer patients sometimes need treatment for acute pain, called the project “terrifying.” She said “it will only discourage doctors from taking care of patients with pain.”
The influential California Health Care Foundation also has pushed back against the project, saying it could harm patients. (California Healthline is an editorially independent publication of the California Health Care Foundation.)
Unusually aggressive for the board, the program is a reaction to the by now well-known phenomenon of physicians over prescribing opioids. Nationally, a host of policy changes and educational efforts have driven down the rate of opioid prescriptions in recent years.
The goal of California’s program, quietly launched four years ago, is not necessarily to link a doctor’s specific prescription to a specific patient’s death — although many of the cases do — but to find doctors whose patterns of prescribing are so dangerous they may lead to patients’ ultimately fatal addictions.
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Filed under: General Problems
Ditto !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
just another outrageous waste of taxpayer money, one needs to ask why is the medical board so willing to throw doctors under the proverbial bus and stomp on them, do doctors not have enough issues unfairly charged against them, especially when one considers that the opioid crisis is total BS, has not been caused by doctors or CPP, seems to me a better way to spend taxpayer money would be protect their doctors from unjust oversight by the gov’t, which is preventing doctors from properly treating CPP, if they want to pick on something relevant how about the huge number of deaths from the tobacco folks, or the quarter million folks who die from medical errors every year, or the increased number of suicides yearly in this country, how about the number of deaths from NSAIDS or aspirin, better yet, how about the tens of millions of CPP being denied the most appropriate medical care, who are suffering the tortures of hell on a daily basis, because there are some determined to demonize pain meds even tho they are the most effective meds for easing and controlling pain and have been used safely for millions of years, where is the concern for this issue, or the lack of education in medical schools related to pain, when fully 1/3 of all Americans are said to have a pain issue that affects their life, seems to me that laws no longer have value, compassion is dead, and common sense has disappeared