The Delicate Path of Treating Addiction Among Doctors

Excellent article on Physician Health Programs here by Frieda Klotz. One problem of PHPs is that they operate with little oversight and almost no ways of meaningfully appealing they’re recommendations. Additionally, they have bidirectional conflicts of interest with the evaluation/treatment centers they utilize. They say these centers specialize in treating physicians which is why they send doctors to all corners of the country, but in reality any good academic department or addition psychiatrist could do what these centers do, only better. And finally, when PHPs say they don’t control licensure but instead that state licensing boards do, that is disingenuous beyond belief, because boards of medicine generally defer every single question of ability to practice to PHPs. Thus, PHPs control licensure decisions for MDs/DOs who have questions of impairment.