> I think one good answer for a stop gap is physicians being allowed to perscribe anything with only outright malpractice as a limit without any imposed tautologies.
You know how the US crisis started, right?
Re:The Opioid Detection Challenge
by schrodinger on Tuesday March 26, 2019 @06:49AM
(#19490631)
That’s how people inadvertently became hooked. The parent is talking about new patients that are already hooked. It’s a different story; you don’t stop being an addict once you’re hooked because your doctor won’t prescribe it.
Sure, but it demonstrates the problem of "let doctors prescribe whatever they want".
Addicts are not helped by ever increasing doses of prescribed opioid medication. There's an argument to be made for maintainance doses until they're ready to stop, and then medically assisted detox, but neither of those are doctors prescribing with no controls.
A physician could say perscribe heroin to help an addict taper off or even to someone new and ask why they want to start and offer healthier doses while still being permitted to dispense according to judgement. For terminal patients or chronic pain cases near suicide it may legitimately be the best option in their case. Medicine is all about "normally it would be a bad idea (amputation) but because the alternative (certainly fatal sepsis pre-antibiotics) is even worse we are doing it".
It would be a radical idea and put more pressure on doctors as a social system admittedly but it could be ideal for practicing medicine without dogmatic insistences codified into law despite evidence being increasingly clear they are wrong.