The Obama administration has announced new rules that would let doctors treat more patients addicted to opioids. That could help Rhode Island, where access to treatment is limited.
Federal health officials are lifting the cap on the number of patients a doctor can treat at one time with buprenorphine, or Suboxone. That’s a drug that helps people stay off of prescription painkillers or heroin. That cap will be raised from 100 to 275 patients.
Miriam Hospital doctor and co-chair of Rhode Island’s overdose prevention task force Jody Rich says the change will benefit Rhode Islanders trying to recover from addiction.
“Well this is excellent news because it expands our ability to give the most effective treatment to people with this disease. There are some caveats.”
Those include the fact that Rhode Island currently has only about 70 doctors trained to prescribe Suboxone.
Rich says Rhode Islanders already have good access to methadone, another medication that helps with opioid addiction.
“But with buprenorphine, trade name Suboxone, we are way behind. We really need a ten-fold increase in the number of physicians willing to prescribe.”
The overdose task force has developed a plan to train more doctors to prescribe Suboxone and create centers that specialize in addiction treatment using the drug.
To prescribe Suboxone, doctors must attend a day of training and receive a special waiver from the government. Primary care doctors are eligible, as well as addiction specialists. But until now doctors could only treat a limited number of patients at a time. The Obama administration’s new rules lifts that cap, but only for addiction specialists.
Suboxone and methadone work to help people addicted to opioids like painkillers or heroin by occupying the same brain receptors opioids occupy, but at lower, non-addictive levels. Research shows the drugs may be the most promising treatment for people with opioid use disorder.
