Trafficker or Healer? And Who's the Victim?
ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 26 — The case of the United States v. William Eliot Hurwitz, which began in federal court here on Monday, is about much more than one physician. It's a battle over who sets the rules for treating patients who are in pain: narcotics agents and prosecutors, or doctors and scientists.
Dr. Hurwitz, depending on which side you listen to, is either the most infamous doctor-turned-drug-trafficker in America or a compassionate physician being persecuted because a few patients duped him.
When Dr. Hurwitz, who is now 62, was sent to prison in 2004 for 25 years on drug trafficking and other charges, the United States attorney for Eastern Virginia, Paul J. McNulty, called the conviction "a major achievement in the government's efforts to rid the pain management community of the tiny percentage of doctors who fail to follow the law and prescribe to known drug dealers and abusers."
Siobhan Reynold, the president of an advocacy group called the Pain Relief Network, hailed Dr. Hurwitz's singular dedication and compared his plight to Galileo's. Some of the country's foremost researchers in pain treatment and addiction supported his appeal for a retrial, which was ordered because the jury in the first case was improperly instructed to ignore whether Dr. Hurwitz had acted in "good faith." These scientists say they are upset by how their research has been distorted by prosecutors in this case, and suppressed by the Drug Enforcement Administration in its campaign against the misuse of OxyContin and other opioid painkillers.
In the first trial, the prosecution accused Dr. Hurwitz of crossing the line from doctor to trafficker by prescribing irresponsibly high doses of painkillers to his patients in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. He was accused of ignoring blatant "red flags" or signs that some patients were misusing or selling the drugs. That is an emotionally powerful argument for a jury: warning signs can seem perfectly clear with the benefit of hindsight.
But to researchers who study deceptive patients, there is no such thing as a blatant red flag. Deception is notoriously difficult to spot, as Dr. Beth F. Jung and Dr. Marcus M. Reidenberg of Cornell University document in a new survey of the literature. They note, for starters, an experiment showing that even police officers and judges — ostensibly experts at detecting fraud — do no better than chance at detecting lying.
Doctors are especially gullible because they have a truth bias: they are trained to treat patients by trusting what they say. Doctors are not good at detecting liars even when they have been warned, during experiments, that they will be visited at some point by an actor faking some condition (like back pain, arthritis or vascular headaches). In six studies reviewed by the Cornell researchers, doctors typically detected the bogus patient no more than 10 percent of the time, and the doctors were liable to mistakenly identify the real patients as fakes.
When treating people with chronic pain, doctors have to rely on what patients tell them because there is no proven way to diagnose or measure it. Also, there is no standard dosage of medicine: A prescription for opioids that would incapacitate or kill one patient might be barely enough to alleviate the pain of another.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/27/science/27tier.html?ex=1332648000&en=91fdf1501d7ff674&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
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