ABSTRACT
The legal regulation of medical practice is intensified when the physician is, or is suspected of being, impaired. The main reason for distinguishing impaired behavior from other forms of medical misconduct is to safeguard patients by identifying, treating, and rehabilitating physicians whose medical skills and behavior may be compromised by remediable illnesses. Despite general agreement in law and medicine about the technical definition of impairment, many states’ laws still use the terms ‘impaired’, ‘troubled’, ‘addicted’, ‘incompetent’, and ‘distressed’ interchangeably. In practice today, impairment has become a legal term of art for any medical condition that brings a physician within the jurisdiction of agencies regulating medical practice. As a result, state programs that help physicians to enter appropriate medical treatment for their conditions have uniformly dropped the term, Impaired Physician Program, and commonly call themselves Physician Health Program (PHP); this change in title underscores the mission of these programs which is to prevent or remove any medical impairment of ability to practice.
