part could bring the wrath of [TMB] down on my colleagues and me.” Mr. Sharp says the board is tighten- ing its documentation requirements as a reaction to more sophisticated docu- mentation practices by the pill mills. “Yet, what does it do? It has a likely potential to net the innocent people who were doing good therapy because they didn’t document everything,” he said. “So you’ve got potentially a good doctor who’s treating … pain manage- ment, who doesn’t document very well and gets punished and a doctor who’s a charlatan or doing less of a good job, who is falsely documenting everything, who skates.” Dr. Schade says TMB’s attorneys maintain that the new rules will strengthen cases against pill mills, keeping them from hiding behind the seemingly looser nature of the old rule language.
“The good doctors are not going to
have a problem with this because the TMB investigations are complaint- driven,” Dr. Schade said. “The only people who are going to have a prob- lem with this are the people who are on the fringe, who are operating ille- gally, in my opinion.” But Dr. Mehta says the major-
ity of physicians treating patients for chronic pain won’t be well-versed in the board’s amended rules. Most are primary care physicians, he said, and the burden of the new requirements is “probably going to dissuade them from wanting to treat that aspect of their care, to make sure they’re complying with all of these new rules.” “[The board was] very focused on
the challenge on the issues they were seeing with pill mills and overpre- scribing controlled substances,” he said, “but not leaving enough flexibil- ity for people to take care of patients in the fashion that we’ve been doing, not recognizing the good job we have been doing up to this point.”
Joey Berlin is a reporter for Texas Medicine. You can reach him by phone at (800) 880-1300, ext. 1393, or (512) 370-1393; by fax at (512) 370-1629; or by email at
joey.berlin@
texmed.org.
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September 2015 TEXAS MEDICINE 55
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