Assessing Legal Risk

Abstract

It is one thing to make critical decisions by rumor and innuendo, and quite another to rely on data and analysis. The article by Goldenbaum et al. provides the data required to begin to reasonably assess the statistical risk that a physician's clinical practice will trigger prosecution by a state medical board or the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The study concludes that physicians, including pain specialists, “have little objective cause for concern” about prosecution or disciplinary action, echoing the DEA's own infamous statement in its “The Myth of the ‘Chilling Effect’ ”[1]. The evidence-based approach in this study may lay to rest the persistent notion that legal risk makes good doctors neglect their patients who need effective medications that happen to be controlled substances. It should remove one of the obstacles that is believed to impede doctors in providing adequate care to their patients, and thus improve the care, health, and well-being of patients in pain. Nevertheless, it may be that no …