Caring for Patients or Policing Them? Prescription Drug Monitoring, Doctors and Opioids

On Becoming a Healer

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Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs) were originally designed for law enforcement to monitor patients and physicians for criminal behavior before it became available to health care professionals. Physicians and pharmacists often find PDMPs helpful because they can verify what a patient tells them and will often decide not to prescribe or dispense opioids if they discover their patient has been going to multiple providers and pharmacies. But is that health care or policing? Who benefits and who is harmed? Those are questions we consider with our guest, Elizabeth Chiarello, PhD, sociology professor and author of Policing Patients: Treatment and Surveillance on the Frontlines of the Opioid Crisis.

The themes we discuss are not unique to PDMPs. This is at least our fifth episode exploring how the criminal justice mindset has crossed into medical practice with harmful effects. Prior ones include:

· Opioids and the physician-patient relationship: What are we getting wrong? March 2022

· Urine Drug Screening: How it can traumatize patients and undermine the physician-patient relationship without helping anyone August 2022

· My patient’s in shackles: Can we take these off? April 2023

· Drug testing at time of birth: How physicians are co-opted into harming families while thinking they are doing the right thing. Nov 2023

61 episodes