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The Department of Health & Human Services has issued guidance to do away with the so-called X-waiver, a move the agency said will increase the number of providers able to deliver medication-assisted treatment and therefore increase patient access to care. “The medical evidence is clear: access to medication-assisted treatment, including buprenorphine that can be prescribed…

“Companies with limited R&D resources can forgo costly and more risky discovery and development of new chemical entities and instead make incremental innovations to existing drugs. In this manner, companies can use the 505(b)(2) regulatory pathway to repurpose or reposition drugs for new indication,” notes Dr. Babul. A 505(b)(2) NDA may differ from a previously…

Dr. David Fiellin, Director of Yale Program in Addiction Medicine, said, “For individuals who come to an emergency department after an opioid overdose and receive buprenorphine, their one-year mortality rate falls by 40%”. The increased recognition of the benefits of buprenorphine comes at a critical time, the researchers said.  

The pandemic has led to regulatory changes: Treatment can now be entirely virtual, including the first appointment. Medicare now pays providers the same for a video appointment as a conventional one — many insurers and Medicaid programs have followed. Patients can get a month’s prescription for buprenorphine instead of just a week’s. Forty percent of…

Dr. Michael Kittay is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist certified by the American Board of Addiction Medicine. In this article Dr. Kittay discusses how buprenorphine can greatly reduce deaths from opioid addiction.  September 6, 2019  Dr. Kittay writes “In March 2019, a report to Florida’s attorney general recognized MAT [Medically Assisted Therapy] as a key component of…

The case for buprenorphine in the treatment of opioid addiction is overwhelming, yet stigmas and biases still remain leading to inadequate treatment of those battling addiction. “Basing medical decisions on beliefs about medications does nothing to help the growing pool of those with [opioid use disorder], who if untreated are likely to fall victim to…

Ruth Potee, M.D., of Greenfield, Mass., said that when buprenorphine first became available in 2002, there was an expectation that it would be widely used in primary care because addiction is a chronic condition. “By 2010, only 2 percent of primary care physicians were prescribing it,” she said. “That was a massive failure.” Dr. David…

“A great part of the tragedy of this opioid crisis is that, unlike in previous such crises America has seen, we now possess effective treatment strategies that could address it and save lives,” Nora Volkow, MD, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, wrote in an editorial accompanying the study (Ann Intern Med 2018…

In this article the Washington Examiner discusses how buprenorphine/naloxone combination should be readily available and could act as a key defense against the on going opioid problem in the U.S. Key to understanding how buprenorphine helps is an understanding of the difference between physical dependence and addiction. This can be a confusing distinction, as the…

In this article “Primary Care and the Opioid-Overdose Crisis — Buprenorphine Myths and Realities,” Sarah Wakeman, MD, medical director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Substance Use Disorders Initiative and Michael Barnett, MD, of the Department of Health Policy and Management, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, discuss how “to have any hope of stemming…