New papers call for better access to medications to treat physicians addicted to opioids

Public health experts and physicians are calling for better access to addiction medication for health professionals with opioid use disorder. In one perspective article, experts call for an end to the current ban that many states have on physicians taking medicines to treat addiction, such as methadone and buprenorphine. The authors claim that existing programs to help physicians rely on an abstinence-only approach and the bans against medications are based on scant evidence that taking them will alter the physicians’ cognition. “Systematically denying clinicians access to effective therapy is bad medicine, bad policy, and discriminatory,” the authors write.

In another article, UCSF physicians detail the case of a first-year medical student at the school who died in 2017 of an opioid overdose and call for better monitoring measures, including medication-based treatment.