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FMCSA appoints panel to review its medical rules
By Sean Kelley
The federal government has appointed five physicians to look over a range of medical issues that affect drivers, including conditions such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease that may prevent truckers from getting or retaining a commercial driver’s license.
The Medical Review Board will help the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration revamp its physical qualifications for commercial motor vehicle drivers, providing guidance on scientific and medical standards. In particular, the panel will help FMCSA decide whether its regulations need adjusting based on new research.
Some of the agency’s current rules are based on studies more than 30 years old. Drivers who have been disqualified because of their medical condition say the agency’s regulations are out of step with current treatment regimes and modern medicine. U.S. Department of Transportation agencies have been successfully sued on several occasions over its medical exemption programs.
In the past 20 years, FMCSA and its predecessor agencies have appointed medical review boards to look at specific issues. But the new board will serve two years and look at all of the agency’s medical programs and regulations, an FMCSA spokesman said.
First on the agenda: drug and alcohol issues and diabetes, even though the FMCSA just revamped its insulin-treated diabetes exemption program in summer 2005. The board will study sleep issues in the second quarter of 2006 before moving on to cardiovascular, vision and hearing qualifications.
The panel includes doctors with a range of specialties from toxicology to neurology. The appointees are:
Dr. Gunnar Andersson, senior vice president for medical affairs and professor and chair of orthopedic surgery, Rush University Medical Center, Chicago;
Dr. Michael Greenberg, associate director for medical toxicology and director of the Medical Toxicology Fellowship Program, Drexel University College of Medicine, Philadelphia;
Dr. Kurt Hegmann, director and associate professor of the Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City;
Dr. Barbara Phillips, chair of the National Sleep Foundation and professor of pulmonary and critical care medicine at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine in Lexington;
Dr. Matthew Rizzo, professor of neurology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine in Iowa City.
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