The Palm Beach Post‘s Michael LaForgia has put together a spicy profile of rogue Florida pain management doctors.
While Florida leaders are calling for laws that ban felons from running pain management clinics, some authorities are pointing to rogue doctors as a serious problem. “Many pain management doctors prescribe drugs responsibly and offer needed care, but authorities say a subset among them is more interested in making money than in easing pain.”
Photo by Ben Sutherland via Flickr
LaForgia writes that some pain clinic doctors are far from the image of benevolent caretakers: “They drive expensive cars, manage off-shore corporations and make multimillion-dollar deals — and sometimes break the rules of the state Board of Medicine.”
A review of records found that a quarter of the 60 pain management practitioners in Palm Beach County have been cited for wrongdoing by the state. A third of them have degrees from foreign medical schools, which often have lower standards than medical schools in the United States.
The story is the latest in the Post‘s “Pill Mill” series, about how “lax regulations have made Florida a pipeline for addicts and drug dealers seeking to obtain addictive painkillers such as OxyContin and hydrocodone.”
