An extensive effort to ease tensions between physicians who specialize in treating pain and the Drug Enforcement Administration over the use of morphine-based painkillers has backfired -- leaving many pain doctors and patients more fearful than before that they could be arrested for practicing what they consider good medicine.
The DEA triggered the new impasse this month when it published a statement clarifying its position on a number of issues central to pain medicine. The document discusses when a doctor is at risk of being investigated for alleged prescription drug diversion, whether patients with known drug problems can ever be prescribed narcotic painkillers and whether doctors can give patients prescriptions to be filled on a future date.
On all these issues, the new DEA position is at odds with a set of guidelines negotiated over several years by DEA officials and a group of leading pain-management experts. Those guidelines were posted on the agency's Web site in August as part of an effort to reassure doctors who properly prescribe narcotics, but several weeks later the document was abruptly removed and described by the agency as inaccurate and unofficial.
Pain-management experts have responded to the new notice with dismay, saying its provisions may well result in the denial of pain relief to millions of sufferers.
Howard A. Heit, a pain and addiction doctor in Fairfax County, said yesterday that "over 90 percent" of patients and doctors could face investigation under the new guidelines.
"This approach is chilling to me, and I work with the DEA all the time," Heit said in an interview. "General practitioners will see this and say, 'Why should I prescribe opioids and risk getting into trouble?' "
In a letter to the DEA last week, David E. Joranson, a University of Wisconsin pain expert who led the negotiations with the agency, accused it of unilaterally changing important and long-standing practices. Some of the changes, the letter said, leave doctors confused about how they should prescribe painkillers and "are likely to interfere in medical practice and pain management."
In explaining why it took down the guidelines in early October, the DEA said the document contained misinformation that would soon be corrected. The reworked version published Nov. 16 in the Federal Register toughened the agency's position on some of the most sensitive issues.
The new DEA statement said, for instance, that the earlier guidelines were incorrect in saying that the number of patients in a doctor's practice receiving prescription narcotics, the number of tablets they receive, and how long their therapy lasts "do not, by themselves, indicate a problem."
In its November statement, the DEA said all three of those factors "may indeed be indicative of diversion." In addition, the statement said, "it is a longstanding legal principle that the Government 'can investigate merely on suspicion that the law is being violated, or even just because it wants assurances that it is not.' "
