A new Florida law that allows for an electronic database for prescription narcotics also requires pain practitioners to register with state health authorities by early January, so rules about qualifications and the forms needed to apply must be ready well before then.

At the end of July 2009 seven doctors were appointed to a state panel aimed at controlling pill mills have only a limited time to decide how pain medicine can legally be practiced in Florida. The Florida boards of medicine and osteopathy created this joint committee to handle the rule-making, with five members from the medical board and two osteopaths. The committee must accomplish a long list of tasks rapidly if the Department of Health is to have applications for pain doctors ready by January 4, 2010.

The committee’s work will flesh out part of a new law, SB 462, signed by Gov. Charlie Crist on June 18. That’s the law that authorizes an electronic database system to monitor prescribing and dispensing of controlled drugs. The intent of this law is that addicts and drug-dealers won’t find it as easy to “doctor-shop” to collect large quantities of pills. But this program can’t be set up entirely until another source of funds—either a federal grant or a private donation—can be found.

Members of the committee from the Board of Medicine include three M.D.s - Fort Lauderdale cardiac surgeon Robert Cline, Miami pediatrician Onelia Lage and West Palm Beach dermatologist Steven Rosenberg - plus consumer member John Beebe of Pompano Beach. The two doctors of osteopathy on the committee are Allan R. Escher, an anesthesiologist from Land O’Lakes, and Bradenton family practitioner Robert McCann.

I am very concerned that only ONE pain management specialist (an anesthesiologist who may or may not be practicing chronic pain management)  is on this board that will be determining how pain management is conducted in Florida. What’s wrong with this picture? At the very least they should include a few more pain specialists on this panel. Or why not have ALL members of the panel be pain management specialists? If it were a dermatology panel would you want cardiologists and proctologists to be making dermatology decisions?

I’m sure many other states are going to be watching how this plays out. I’m blogging about this because in the end I believe that laws and processes like this are one more way that people in need of appropriate chronic pain management will be hurt.

To learn about the my views on quality chronic pain management please go to my article The Right to Quality Chronic Pain Management that you can download for free on our Ariticles page.

If you would like to see my upcoming trainings and especially to learn about my 20 hour (three days) Addiction-Free Pain Management® Certification Training on December 7-9, 2009 in Sacramento California designed to teach treatment strategies for people living with chronic pain and coexisting disorders including disorders including addiction please Click Here and scroll down to the December 7-9, 2009 for the description and how to sign up.

You can learn more about the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System at our website www.addiction-free.com. If you are living with chronic pain, especially if you’re in recovery or believe you may have a medication or other mental health problem and want to learn how to develop a plan for managing your pain and medication effectively, please go to our Publications page and check out my book the Addiction-Free Pain Management® Recovery Guide: Managing Pain and Medication in Recovery. To purchase this book please Click Here. To listen to a radio interview I did conducted by Mary Woods for her program One Hour at a Time please Click Here to go to this interview.To read the latest issue of Chronic Pain Solutions Newsletter please Click here. If you want to sign up for the newsletter, please Click here and input your name and email address. You will then recieve an autoresponse email that you need to reply to in order to finalize enrollment.