The Food and Drug Administration, overriding the advice of an expert panel, said Monday that it would not require doctors to have special training before they could prescribe long-acting narcotic painkillers that can lead to addiction.

But the agency said companies that make the drugs, like OxyContin, fentanyl and methadone, would be required to underwrite the cost of voluntary programs aimed at teaching doctors how to best use them.

The F.D.A. announcement came after several years of deliberations by the agency into the growing problem of prescription painkiller abuse and misuse. In 2010, a panel of outside experts assembled by the F.D.A. overwhelmingly rejected the agency’s proposal that physician training be voluntary.

Instead, that panel said that mandatory training was essential both to reduce the abuse of strong painkillers, or opioids and to make sure that pain patients were treated appropriately with them.

In introducing the plan on Monday, both Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, the F.D.A. commissioner, and R. Gil Kerlikowske, President Obama’s top drug policy adviser, said they were hopeful that Congress would eventually enact mandatory physician training.

But the Obama administration has yet to draft legislation, despite voicing support for more than a year.

Major doctors groups like the American Medical Association have fought the idea of mandatory training, saying that the programs would be burdensome and could reduce the number of physicians who treat pain patients.

Over the last decade, overdose deaths related to the abuse and misuse of long-acting narcotics have reached epidemic proportions.

There are also growing concerns that long-term use of the drugs can cause a variety of problems, such as sharply reduced hormone production, sleep apnea and increased falls and fractures in people over 70.

Dr. Scott M. Fishman, a pain specialist, said he believed that the public health issues surrounding opioid use had reached a point at which doctor training was essential.

“The problem of prescription drug abuse has become so severe, I believe that the time has come to make that training mandatory,” said Dr. Fishman, a professor at the University of California, Davis.

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Medical malpractice lawsuits have existed in the United States for more than 150 years, though today, most medical errors are never pursued in court, and a large majority of claims never result in any kind of payment to patients. And even though the direct and indirect costs of such suits account for only 2.4 percent of total health care costs, that’s still $55 billion yearly. To say nothing of the even more important social costs, an issue addressed last month in The Journal of the American College of Surgeons.

Researchers surveyed more than 7,000 surgeons and found that nearly one in four were in the midst of litigation. Surgeons involved in a recent lawsuit were more likely to suffer from depression and burnout, including feelings of emotional exhaustion and detachment, a low sense of accomplishment and even thoughts of suicide.

“Malpractice is at the top of the list of major stressors for most physicians,” said Dr. Charles M. Balch, the lead author and a professor of surgery at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. “It’s right up there with financial distress, serious work-home conflicts and life-and-death circumstances.”

Other studies estimate that, depending on the specialty, anywhere from 75 percent to 99 percent of practicing doctors will over the course of a lifetime be threatened with a lawsuit. “We are not talking about some small subset of physicians who are vulnerable because they are weak,” said Dr. Tait D. Shanafelt, a co-author and associate professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. “Malpractice affects a wide swath of our colleagues and their patients.”

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