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Concurrent use of opioid pain medications, benzodiazepines, antihistamines, antipsychotics, antianxiety agents, or other CNS depressants increases a patient’s risk for overdose.¹

With the prevalence of online self-diagnosis tools, the nature of physician-patient exchanges has shifted significantly. Search trends show that a large number of people research their symptoms online. In the U.S., one third of adults say that they have gone online in an effort to self-diagnose. 77% of these online searches begin with a major search engine such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing.¹ With Google reporting in 2016 that they handle more than 2 trillion searches per year,² and that 1% of all searches were related to medical symptoms,³ that’s more than 20 billion web searches for medical symptoms on Google alone every year.

Four federal tort reform bills that could affect medical liability law have passed the House of Representatives in the first session of the 115th United States Congress, with an additional medical liability bill having been introduced in the House.^1,4

Physicians need to be especially careful when managing chronic pain with opioid medications. Medical practices often seek risk management advice when they suspect a patient is misusing prescription medications, is not complying with treatment, or when the patient is making unreasonable demands for more opioids. If a patient suffers harm as a result of opioid medication use, a physician may become the target of a lawsuit alleging negligent treatment of chronic pain.

A comatose, ventilator-dependent, car accident victim lies in an intensive care unit while her husband and her parents discuss her future quality of life and argue about what type of care she would have wanted. This scenario may initially come to mind when the average person hears the term medical ethics. However, the concept of medical ethics is much more common in everyday practice than a dramatic ICU clash is.