Who was Ryan Haight?
Ryan Haight was an 18-year-old honor student from La Mesa, California who died on February 12, 2001, from an overdose of hydrocodone ordered from an online doctor he never saw — and shipped to his home from a rogue online pharmacy during the beginning of the opioid epidemic.
The pharmacist, Clayton Fuchs, filled the online prescription …
A lot has been written about Suboxone, the buprenorphine treatment drug. For many, Suboxone acts as an effective medication to treat opioid addiction. For others, it’s a highly-valued street drug that is commonly diverted and misused. To understand and acknowledge the darker side of Suboxone we have to look back at its history over the past 16 years.
History of Suboxone
Suboxone was first approved by the FDA in 2002 to treat …
I’ve been practicing as an interventional pain management physician for over six years. It was a long road to get here — four years of medical school, four years of residency in anesthesiology and one year of fellowship (in addition to the four years of undergraduate education). So people say, “You must really love what you do.” Sure, during residency there was light at the end of the grueling tunnel …
Dr. Pramela Ganji had just finished her lunch when she was told that the appellate court had reversed and vacated her conviction. At first, she didn’t believe it.
After all, this whole experience had been surreal. Dr. Ganji, a 68-year-old well-respected medical doctor and married mother of 3 children, had practiced medicine for 40 years without incident. Her patients loved her, and she had dedicated her life to helping others. …
She could have been my charming tiny kindergarten teacher, sitting there nonchalantly in her wheelchair with neatly folded arms in her lap. The delicate, airy cloud of silvery blonde hair on her head resembled Queen Elizabeth’s style. I named her Ms. Elizabeth. A few moments ago, though, she looked like a young child who could not comprehend the meaning of her condition. Whenever she was spoken to, her mind seemed …
Opioids are an essential class of drugs used in pain management. In recent years, complex mechanisms pertaining to their abusive use have prompted a deadly crisis which is unfolding in the United States. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated that 91 Americans lose their lives daily due to an overdose of opioid drugs. This public health crisis has inspired much apprehension even among Haitian …
Prescription opioid abuse is one of the United States’ greatest public health challenges. Approximately 97.5 million Americans consume opioids annually, and around 90 people die every day from opioid overuse. The last time in recent history a health care crisis garnered this much public attention was following the release of the 1964 “Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health” correlating smoking to heart disease and …
No, I’m not talking about putting fentanyl into my own veins — a remarkably bad idea. I’m questioning the habitual, reflex use of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, in clinical anesthesiology practice.
I’ve been teaching clinical anesthesiology, supervising residents and medical students, in the operating rooms of academic hospitals for the past 18 years. Anesthesiology residents often ask if I “like” fentanyl, wanting to know if we’ll plan to use it in …
“Do not get caught” seems to be the real rule of the law in South Florida, where I live.
I was trained to limit the use of controlled substances, narcotics, hypnotics and sedatives. Their use can affect consciousness, ability to drive a car and work. More severe consequences include respiratory depression and overdose from too high of a dosage or mixing too many medications and over the counter items.
The Joint Commission, …
To listen to all those desperate to reform health care, you get the impression that physicians are pretty horrible people. We are all sexist, greedy, money grubbing tyrants who will perform unnecessary tests and procedures just to make money. We don’t care about quality or cost. We are killing off 250,000 patients every year with our ignored “errors.” We purposely keep our patients in pain, or we addict them to …
I am an interventional pain physician. I spend most of my days doing spine injections with a fair amount of kyphoplasties and spinal cord stimulators thrown in as well. It seems to me that these are minor procedures that shouldn’t evoke anxiety in patients, but they do. Patients get nervous. They get anxious.
I am also a singer. I had the privilege of being classically trained through my college years. Like …
Wellness. It’s all the rage these days as we try to manage our crazy work schedules while still maintaining balance in life. We have wellness committees, wellness workshops, wellness coaches, and wellness apps for our smartphones.
So, then, what does it mean to be well?
To the average person, and to the dictionary, to be well is to be “in good health” or “in a good or satisfactory way.”
However, to those suffering …
I have written about pain medicine, previously on this blog, and it generated some spirited responses. Let me be clear that I am completely against all forms of pain, whether foreign or domestic, physical, spiritual, psychic or even phantom. The medical profession has superb tools to combat and relieve pain, and physicians should utilize them, within the boundaries of appropriate use. We now have an actual specialty — …
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In March, 2016, the CDC released guidelines for prescribing opioids. The guidelines were a response to a serious and growing problem: millions of pain patients became addicted to prescribed opioids, and hundreds of thousands died as a result.
Since the guidelines were released, reports of pain patients being abruptly cut off of their medication or having their medication abruptly reduced have become rampant. These patients report they were using opioids long …
A guest column by the American Society of Anesthesiologists, exclusive to KevinMD.com.
That men and women are different has been discussed since Adam and Eve. That they experience and cope with pain differently has been consistently described in research studies.
It is concerning, however, to learn that women may experience more pain than men, but receive …
One thing I learned early on as a doctor is different people have different tolerances for pain. At one end of the spectrum, for example, I recall a woman who came to the emergency department with a small splinter in her foot. She arrived wailing in pain, and we had to take her back to a treatment room ahead of other patients because her howling was scaring the people in …
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A local hospital is trying a new, controversial but more efficient approach to medical care. “We have changed our guidelines, if you want Dilaudid you get Dilaudid, if you want Valium, you get Valium. No questions asked,” CEO Michael Shoemaker told reporters Wednesday.
In what experts are calling pure genius, emergency …
My patients lie to me every day. Some tell me that they have been taking their medications regularly when they haven’t. Some say that they have been eating a healthy diet and exercising for at least 30 minutes every day and don’t know where the extra pounds are coming from. Some lie that they are using condoms every time they have sex, that they have quit smoking, and if they …
In March 2014, Zohydro ER (hydrocodone extended-release) was introduced to the market. Never in my medical lifetime do I recall a medication stirring such angst. Worries of mass overdoses, backdoor FDA conspiracies, and blatant disregard for the public well-being abound. Is there method to this madness?
Zohydro ER is a pain pill that, when taken by mouth, is released slowly over twelve hours. The active ingredient, hydrocodone, is an opioid (i.e. narcotic) that’s been around for decades …
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