23536
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Dec 16, 2010
- Messages
- 7,725
Drug cops want open access to your medical records
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...ops-want-open-access-to-your-medical-records/
By Radley Balko, Updated: January 24 at 12:40 pm
In response to a spike in overdoses on prescription painkillers, and a rash of media scare stories about ADHD drugs like Ritalin and Adderall, a number of politicians, pundits, and public health activists have demanded better monitoring of doctors and patients. The thinking is that by creating databases of patients taking controlled substances, we’ll be able to catch drug-dealing doctors and intervene on behalf of drug addicted patients.
I think many of the reports about accidental addicts and overdose deaths are either exaggerated or don’t tell the whole story, but that’s too much to get into here. (See the series I wrote on this issue for Huffington Post.) But this column by Christopher Moraff in central Pennsylvania’s Patriot-News warns of the consequences letting the government see what medication you’re taking:
It’s easy to imagine how this could be abused, how patient data could get into the wrong hands. Imagine a law enforcement officer looking for ammunition in a divorce or custody dispute. Or perhaps a politician who takes the wrong position on police pensions or police accountability might see his painkiller scripts leaked to the press. (That sort of retaliation wouldn’t be unheard of.) Moraff points out that Virginia’s prescription database has already been accessed by hackers, who then threatened to release the records of 8 million people.
But Moffat also touches on another, less obvious problem—the chilling effect this will have on doctors. For example, one of the red flags federal investigators look for when looking for doctors to accuse of “drug dealing” is the overall number of prescriptions a given doctor writes for various controlled drugs. That means that as he’s deciding your course of treatment, or whether to prescribe opioids to improve your mother’s quality of life as she’s dying from terminal cancer, he’ll be thinking about how many scripts for those drugs he may have already written for other patients. It’s an intrusion on the doctor-patient relationship, and could influence a doctor’s decisions about a patient’s treatment with factors that have nothing to do what’s best for that particular patient.
This of course is how we fight the drug war. Because some people harm themselves with some drugs, we punish everyone, not only by restricting access to those drugs, but in this particular instance also by eroding privacy protections and trespassing on doctor-patient privilege.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...ops-want-open-access-to-your-medical-records/
By Radley Balko, Updated: January 24 at 12:40 pm
In response to a spike in overdoses on prescription painkillers, and a rash of media scare stories about ADHD drugs like Ritalin and Adderall, a number of politicians, pundits, and public health activists have demanded better monitoring of doctors and patients. The thinking is that by creating databases of patients taking controlled substances, we’ll be able to catch drug-dealing doctors and intervene on behalf of drug addicted patients.
I think many of the reports about accidental addicts and overdose deaths are either exaggerated or don’t tell the whole story, but that’s too much to get into here. (See the series I wrote on this issue for Huffington Post.) But this column by Christopher Moraff in central Pennsylvania’s Patriot-News warns of the consequences letting the government see what medication you’re taking:
It’s easy to imagine how this could be abused, how patient data could get into the wrong hands. Imagine a law enforcement officer looking for ammunition in a divorce or custody dispute. Or perhaps a politician who takes the wrong position on police pensions or police accountability might see his painkiller scripts leaked to the press. (That sort of retaliation wouldn’t be unheard of.) Moraff points out that Virginia’s prescription database has already been accessed by hackers, who then threatened to release the records of 8 million people.
But Moffat also touches on another, less obvious problem—the chilling effect this will have on doctors. For example, one of the red flags federal investigators look for when looking for doctors to accuse of “drug dealing” is the overall number of prescriptions a given doctor writes for various controlled drugs. That means that as he’s deciding your course of treatment, or whether to prescribe opioids to improve your mother’s quality of life as she’s dying from terminal cancer, he’ll be thinking about how many scripts for those drugs he may have already written for other patients. It’s an intrusion on the doctor-patient relationship, and could influence a doctor’s decisions about a patient’s treatment with factors that have nothing to do what’s best for that particular patient.
This of course is how we fight the drug war. Because some people harm themselves with some drugs, we punish everyone, not only by restricting access to those drugs, but in this particular instance also by eroding privacy protections and trespassing on doctor-patient privilege.
