The Food and Drug Administration rejected their own expert panel’s recommendation that medical doctors be required to have special training before they could prescribe long-acting narcotic painkillers that can lead to addiction.
The AMA has fought this measure, saying it would be too burdensome for their members to be required to be trained before prescribing these drugs. Given the epidemic of addiction that’s being caused by inappropriate prescription patterns, and given that medical doctors are required to get a certain number of Continuing Education Units (CEU) annually to maintain their licenses anyway, it’s strange that this would be something so distasteful to both the FDA and AMA.
