Arielle Gerard is an addiction medicine and preventive medicine/public health physician.
Early in my addiction medicine fellowship, I met a patient for the second time while shadowing another physician in their practice. The patient was a former nurse with opioid use disorder on maintenance therapy with buprenorphine (commonly called Suboxone, the original brand name of a formulation combined with naloxone), a partial opioid agonist that is FDA-approved for the treatment of opioid use disorder and can be conveniently prescribed in the …
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A few months ago, I submitted an article to KevinMD summarizing a narrative review I compiled grounded in advocacy journalism asserting that Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME)-regulated: 1) work hour maximums, and 2) U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) misclassification are the leading drivers of preventable occupational injury for house staff that are also most …
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In 2003, the ACGME first set a national standard for house staff duty hours, limiting maximum shift lengths from unlimited hours to 30 hours (24+6) for all house staff. With continued concerns about medical errors and sleep deprivation safer, standards were updated in 2011 to reduce maximum shift lengths to 20 hours (16+4) for the first/internship year (noted here as “2011 reform”). …
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Over 100,000 medical and surgical resident physicians and fellows (combined, “house staff”) are the first-line physicians for most patients in the nation’s 1,100+ teaching hospitals. Maximum weekly work hours regulated by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) are colloquially cited to be 80 per week. Notably, however, they are 80 hours averaged over 4 weeks (88 with “sound educational rationale”), without maximum weekly hour …
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Medical cannabis is a treatment option with a low risk of dependence, minimal side effects, and few detrimental health effects, that has the potential to help hundreds of thousands of people suffering from various debilitating symptoms. Medical cannabis has gotten a bad rap over the past several decades in the United States due to laws put into place in the early-mid …
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