Doctors caught between struggling opioid patients and crackdown on prescriptions

Dr. Stephen Nadeau received a warning from the Gainesville, Fla., hospital where he worked.

Their policy on prescribing opioids was changing, to go beyond federal guidelines aimed at the national overdose crisis that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

The hospital would stop treating pain with opioids. And every doctor, including Nadeau, had to stop prescribing them. Doctors otherwise risked losing hospital admitting privileges – and perhaps even their medical license.

In Helena, Mont., Dr. Mark Ibsen was feeling heat from the state medical board – and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), for the high-dose opioids he was prescribing to patients in severe, chronic pain. An allegation made by what he described as a disgruntled employee charged Ibsen was overprescribing.

As a result, the state medical board suspended his license. The DEA visited five times, Ibsen said, suggesting he was risking his livelihood and could end up in jail if he kept prescribing.

Both doctors complied and stopped prescribing, affecting roughly 230 of their patients. Tragically, among those were several who committed suicide, the doctors said, when they couldn’t find another health care provider to relieve the pain.

That’s a scenario playing out across the country, as government agencies respond to the staggering rate of drug overdose deaths, involving primarily illegal opioids like heroin and illicit fentanyl. Doctors who maintain they are responsibly prescribing opioids are getting caught up in the crackdown, according to dozens of medical care providers interviewed by Fox News, leaving little room to both play by the rules and properly treat huge numbers of patients who legitimately suffer chronic and intense pain.

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