Unger Primary Care Concierge Medical Group, Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. Dr. Unger is a member of JFP’s editorial board. He reported no potential conflict of interest relevant to this article.
To that end, I encourage all FPs to take the 8-hour online course provided by the American Society of Addiction Medicine to obtain a US Drug Enforcement Administration waiver for prescribing buprenorphine (available at: http://www.asam.org/education/live-online-cme/buprenorphine-course). It costs less than $200 and successful completion of this CME program allows FPs to deliver office-based opioid dependency interventions as per the Drug Addiction Treatment Act of 2000.
Right now, monthly patient censuses indicate that there are about 3234 buprenorphine prescribers providing care for 245,016 opioid-dependent patients, and fewer than 20% of those prescribers are FPs.8 We need to change that. We have an opportunity to invest in the future of these high-risk patients. Let’s not let them down.
