From NPR:
Doctors who follow the advice will consider alternatives to opioids and prescribe only a few days’ worth of the drugs, if they decide that’s the best course for short-term pain relief. They’ll also avoid starting patients on long-acting opioids, like Oxycontin, and will refrain from replacing lost, or allegedly lost, opioid prescriptions without lots of due diligence first.
I like it.
So if you have to rely on the emergency room and need long term pain medication, you have to incur a multi hundred dollar bill (which you cannot pay) every three days to be allowed to buy $5.00 of your painkillers. This so that New York can feel good about the fact that it is “doing something” to keep idiots from killing themselves. Very good indeed.
We have the same poster in many of our EDs here in Oregon, with support from ER nurses and docs professional organizations noted prominently.
And Scott, the place to get chronic pain meds is from a prescriber who knows you, understands how you react to opiates, and can face a DEA audit to make sure that s/he is following guidelines – and that person is either your primary care physician or pain management doc, not the ED staff.