What’s the news: Three authors of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s controversial 2016 guideline on opioid prescribing now say their advice has been misused in ways that can harm patients.

These misapplications “include inflexible application of recommended dosage and duration thresholds and policies that encourage hard limits and abrupt tapering of drug dosages, resulting in sudden opioid discontinuation or dismissal of patients from a physician’s practice,” wrote the CDC’s Deborah Dowell, MD, MPH, Tamara Haegerich, PhD, and Roger Chou, MD, in a New England Journal of Medicine essay, “No Shortcuts to Safer Opioid Prescribing.”

My latest for the AMA. The whole shebang.