People who take opioid medications for chronic pain may have a hard time finding a new primary care clinic that will take them as a patient if they need one, according to a new ‘secret shopper’ study of hundreds of clinics across the country. Stigma against long-term users of prescription opioids, likely related to the prospect of taking on a patient who might have an opioid use disorder or addiction, appears to play a role.

Stigma against long-term users of prescription opioids, likely related to the prospect of taking on a patient who might have an opioid use disorder or addiction, appears to play a role, the University of Michigan research suggests.

Simulated patients who said their doctor or other primary care provider had retired were more likely to be told they could be accepted as new patients, compared with those who said their provider had stopped prescribing opioids to them for an unknown reason.

The U-M primary care provider and health care researcher who led the new study, Pooja Lagisetty, M.D., M.Sc., hopes that her team’s new findings published in the journal Pain could help primary care clinics look at their practices regarding existing or prospective new patients.

«We need to make sure we’re training prescribers and their teams in addressing the systemic biases that this research highlights,» says Lagisetty, a general internal medicine physician at Michigan Medicine, U-M’s academic medical center. «We shouldn’t even be thinking about the reason that patients are giving when they seek to access care.

«Even if you think that someone is using opioids for a reason other than pain, or that long-term opioids are not an effective pain care strategy, those are exactly the patients we in primary are should be seeing,» she adds. «Restricting their primary care access limits their ability to engage in pain-focused care and potentially addiction-focused care.»

It also worsens stigma, she says, by suggesting that people using opioids for pain are more worthy of receiving care than those who may have addiction.

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Materials provided by Michigan Medicine — University of Michigan. Original written by Kara Gavin. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.