Abuse of family physicians by patients seeking controlled substances.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To examine family physicians' career prevalence and monthly incidence of workplace abuse by controlled substance prescription seekers. DESIGN: A 4-page cross-sectional survey. SETTING: A family medicine continuing medical education event in Halifax, NS. PARTICIPANTS: The survey was distributed to 316 family physicians attending the continuing medical education event. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Career prevalence and monthly incidence of workplace abuse related to the act of prescribing controlled substances. RESULTS: Fifty-six percent (n = 178) of the 316 surveys were returned completed. Half the study participants were men (49%). Most study participants were in private practice and lived in Nova Scotia, and approximately half (51%) practised in urban settings. On average, the study participants had 20 years of practice experience. The career prevalence of abusive encounters related to controlled substance prescribing was divided into "minor," "major," and "severe" incidents. Overall, 95% of study participants reported having experienced at least 1 incident of minor abuse; 48% had experienced at least 1 incident of major abuse; and 17% had experienced at least 1 incident of severe abuse during their careers. Further, 30% reported having been abused in the past month; among those, the average number of abusive encounters was 3. Most (82%) of the abusers were male with a history of addiction (85%) and mental illness (39%). Opioids were the most frequently sought controlled substance. CONCLUSION: Abuse of family physicians by patients seeking controlled substances is substantial. Family physicians who prescribe controlled substances are at risk of being subjected to minor, major, or even severe abuse. Opioids were the most often sought controlled substance. A national discussion to deal with this issue is needed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".