| Podcast
Although opioids remain an important tool in aiding the management of pain in the United States, the balance between the potential benefits and harms must be considered. Some specific harms are manifested in the abuse of opioids for nonmedical purposes. The primary access to prescribable opioids for...
| Podcast
Opioid emergencies have risen with the increase in prescribing of opioids. It is imperative that prescribers of opioids know when to coprescribe naloxone therapy to their patients. It goes beyond the patient suspected of misuse and abuse. This presentation will focus on the patients you might not...
| Podcast
The United States is in the midst of a prescription drug crisis. Each year, over 100 million surgical procedures are performed in the US and routinely opioid use is prescribed for postoperative pain. While the recent CDC guidelines are geared towards outpatient chronic pain management, few concerns...
| Podcast
Designer drugs are structurally related to illegal psychoactive drugs and include cathinones (bath salts and flakka), synthetic cannabinoids (K2), piperazines (Molly), salvia, kratom, and desomorphine (krokodil). Often designer drugs are readily available on the Internet or in head shops and skirt...
| Podcast
Management of acute pain following surgery or trauma requiring opioid treatment can be particularly challenging in patients with substance use disorders. This session will explore ways to optimize analgesic care, keep patients safe, and promote behavioral consequences that are just and equitable in...
| Article
Certainly the idea of making an opioid safer is very desirable, and the current approach has been to address certain components of the way that these drugs are abused. Most of the products we have currently are focused at abuse through nasal snorting or through injection. We have technologies that...
| Article
About 10 years ago I wrote a paper with Ken Kirsh and Howard Heit about how every stakeholder from the clinician to the patient, to the media, to law enforcement, regulators, could all work together to improve the state of affairs in pain management and the fate of people with pain. It was Ken Kirsh...
| Video
UDT is the preferred tool in patient centered care, and is increasingly important in risk management. Heit and Gourlay discuss how it can offer clinicians insight into patient identification, treatment, and monitoring, and provide objective data for risk evaluation.
| Article
Urine testing is very good at doing some things but I think we have to be careful that we don’t extend the science of urine drug testing beyond what it’s good for. Really what it’s good for is, as Howard says, opening a dialogue; facilitating a difficult, in some cases impossible, subject to broach...
| Video
A specialist in addiction medicine offers guidance in identifying opioid misuse and the appropriate means of withdrawing patients from long term opioid therapy. The longer term management and rehabilitation of these patients is also considered.