By Dr. Denise Phan, Guest Columnist

Even as the Covid-19 pandemic occupies the nation’s attention, most of my work as a primary care doctor still revolves around other chronic diseases.  

Every day, people are still giving birth, still getting sick, still dying from terminal diseases, still getting hurt and still having pain. Yet more and more, physicians’ hands are tied when it comes to prescribing opiate medication to reduce their patients’ pain and suffering, especially now that surgeries, physical therapy and injections are discouraged due to social distancing guidelines.

Last year, a patient came to me with a letter from her previous doctor explaining that he is no longer able to prescribe any opiates. The local pain specialists he recommended in his letter were either not taking new patients on opiates or would not prescribe the dosage of oxycodone needed to control her pain.

Several months ago, another patient came in complaining that his pain specialist had cut his dosage down so quickly that he now resorts to street heroin to control the pain and withdrawal.

Yet another patient asked me a few months ago to stop the chemotherapy for his lung cancer and put him in hospice care so he can get adequate pain control.

And just last month, a patient told me she can no longer bear to attend her online fibromyalgia support group because five people in the group had killed themselves in the past few years.

Recently, a frustrated nurse in the oncology/orthopedic ward asked me, “What is it with you doctors? Are you all going to let people scream themselves to death from pain? "

A cardiologist friend of mine remarked, “Ten years ago you could get sued for not prescribing pain meds to patients, now you can get sued just for writing one."

Project Targets ‘Inappropriate’ Prescribing

One of the causes for this sad state of affairs in California is the state medical board’s “Death Certificate Project.” The board investigated the overdose deaths of 450 patients who may have received “inappropriate” opioid prescriptions and sent warning letters to their physicians. Disciplinary action was taken against dozens of them.

The Death Certificate Project sounds like a well-meaning idea, but in practice it has decimated the field of pain management and brought tremendous suffering to patients living with real legitimate pain.

The most egregious of the project's many faults is the decision to pull death certificates from 2012-2013, and then use the state’s prescription drug database to identify "overprescribers." The deaths occurred years before the medical board adopted tougher guidelines on the prescribing of opiates in 2015 and the CDC released its opioid guideline in 2016. 

By this irrational act, the project targeted hundreds of primary care doctors and pain management specialists who were caring for the high-risk populations of chronic pain patients, and were following previous California guidelines to treat pain aggressively and with opiate medications if necessary.  

To date, the board has filed accusations of negligent prescribing against 66 physicians. Forty-eight of them have faced discipline such as license surrender, public reprimands and probation. Some were forced into early retirement. Eighteen doctors are still awaiting hearings or trials. The vast majority of them are responsible physicians who have had no other complaints lodged against them. 

Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, standards of care and public policies have been rapidly evolving, even flip-flopping from week to week, some causing and some preventing thousands of deaths along the way. It is incredibly irrational to retroactively penalize doctors for following the previous standards of care during a epidemic. Yet this is precisely what the Death Certificate Project is doing by focusing on overdoses in 2012-2013, when the opioid epidemic had not even been recognized or publicized by the medical board itself. 

Imagine going to work every day on the frontline of an epidemic, knowing that the state or federal government can change their policies at any time; and that they can go back and prosecute you for the deaths that resulted from their previous policies.  As we watched our colleagues in the field falling like dominoes one by one, can you blame the doctors for running scared?

The primary result of the Death Certificate Project has been the effective removal of dozens of frontline doctors amid a decades-long shortage of primary care physicians and on the eve of a pandemic. The secondary result of this program is the refusal of terrorized remaining physicians to prescribe any pain medications at all or to drastically reduced the dosages. This has caused a marked increase in pain, suffering and suicide rates in the legitimate pain and addiction patient populations, as well as the subsequent rise in the use of street opioids and thus opioid deaths overall.

The data on California and national overdose deaths shows that prescription opioid overdoses have declined since 2014. Overall drug deaths spiked up sharply in 2017-2018 – but this was mainly due to street heroin and illicit fentanyl. This shows how sadly unnecessary and harmful the project is.

Beside the human and societal costs listed above, this project is costing California millions of dollars annually in funding for administrative, consulting and legal fees. This is not counting the immeasurable cost to the medical system from the loss of physician resources during the biggest pandemic of our time. 

When a medication or treatment does not work as intended and causes many harmful side effects, we need to stop it. If you are a resident of California, please join me in a letter writing campaign to end this irrational, unnecessary, harmful and costly Death Certificate Project at the Action Network website

Dr. Denise Phan is an Internal Medicine physician in Los Angeles. She works in private practice in the San Fernando Valley and is on staff at Valley Presbyterian Hospital. Dr. Phan is active in the annual missions of the mobile health units of the Social Assistance Program for Vietnam and the International Humanitarian Mission.