Share data on patients, medical council tells de-addiction centres

Tribune News Service

Ludhiana, July 17

In order to check drug abuse in the name of de-addiction, the Punjab Medical Council (PMC) has asked all doctors involved in de-addiction in the state to share their data of patients in the past three years with any government agency on written request as it is mandatory as per the code of ethics.

According to Dr GS Grewal, president, Punjab Medical Council, there were a large number of complaints from the relatives of addicts that their kin were getting habit-forming de-addicting drugs from these centres.

“It is an irony that the addicts end up getting addicted to the drugs which are supposed to help them overcome addiction,” he said.

He said that a number of drug de-addiction centres have been found to be providing such drugs — which have to be used for a limited period only — to the addicts. This defeats the very purpose of the de-addiction exercise.

“In the process of getting rid of the primary addiction, the patient gets into secondary addiction,” he said.

The PMC president said that some of the commonly used drugs in de-addiction like buponorphine and tramadol were originally meant for the terminally ill cancer patients as these are very effective pain killers.

Now, these are used for de-addiction purposes also. He said that drugs like buponorphine cannot be given for more than a week to any patient as these are habit-forming.

But the PMC has learnt that these are made easily available to the addicts by some unscrupulous centres, with the addicts getting hooked to these.

“It is required that all doctors treating addiction must save a photo ID of each patient so that they cannot use multiple de-addiction centres to get medicines. The ID used must be mentioned on the prescription as well as on the centre’s record so that the data of total number of patients is not fudged. These details should be sent along with a report to the government,” said Grewal.