Authors

Stephen P. Wood, MS, ACNP is an acute care nurse practitioner practicing emergency medicine in Boston, Massachusetts. He is a former fellow in bioethics at the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School in Boston and a visiting researcher at the Petrie Flom Center at Harvard Law School..
medical needles in a pile

Paper or Plastic: How would you like your IV fluids today?

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The patient was a very pleasant 45-year-old woman who came into the emergency department with fever, headache and neck pain; all signs and symptoms concerning for meningitis or possibly encephalitis. Both are often an infectious, sometimes inflammatory diseases of either the meninges, the thin membrane that covers the brain, or the brain itself. The diagnosis is considered clinically, based on signs and symptoms as well as some clinical exam, and often confirmed by a lumbar puncture or spinal tap.

I discussed this with the patient and she agreed to the procedure. I had her positioned and had opened the prepackaged kit to get started. The kit is wrapped in plastic, a necessity to keep equipment sterile, especially for a procedure that will involve instrumenting a space that communicates with the central nervous system; the brain and spinal cord.

Off came the plastic, and into the trash. There are also some stickers for labeling the syringes used to inject the anesthetic, but I didn’t need those either, so they also went into the trash. There are extra plastic syringes that you don’t need, as well as a plastic straw to draw up the anesthetic if you choose to use that instead of a needle. Into the trash. There are several more items in the kit that are destined for the trash as well: a small circular piece of foam for sticking used needles into, as well as unused needles. By the end of the procedure, I had become a one-man wrecking ball of plastic waste.

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Are we speaking the same language? An alphabet soup of acronyms in the opioid epidemic

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By Stephen Wood

Medication Replacement Therapy (MRT), Medication Assisted Therapy (MAT). Opioid Substitution Treatment (OST). Opioid Replacement Therapy (ORT). Opioid Agonist Therapy (OAT). This confusing array of acronyms are all terms that have made their way into the dictum of patients, healthcare providers, policy leaders, politicians and journalists —and new ones pop up every day.

Buprenorphine Enabled Recovery Pathway (BERP) is one I just came up with but could just as easily make its way into the menagerie of acceptable buzzwords for using an agonist-antagonist (or other drug) for the treatment of substance use disorder.

It doesn’t stop there.

Safe Consumption Facilities (SCF), Safer Injection Facilities (SIF), another SIF in Supervised Injection Facilities, Supervised Injection Sites (SIS), Medically Supervised Injection Sites (MSIS), and Drug Consumption Sites (DCS) only begin to round out the list of areas that people who use intravenous drugs can go to use in a safe, clean and supported environment.

We see these terms bantered about in the media, among healthcare providers, legislators and policy makers. We hear them from patients with SUD, their families as well as advocate organizations. These terms are in published research reports and clinical studies. To even the savviest person though, it is a confusing alphabet soup of acronyms that are all trying to describe an array of programs, possibly something similar or maybe even the same.

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Buprenorphine and Naloxone Legislative Restrictions: A Compromise Towards Harm Reduction

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Limiting access to MAT can result in patient harm. Improving access using a bridge therapy model may help save lives.

There were approximately 64,000 deaths from opioid overdose in 2016, including deaths from both prescription and illicit drugs. The incidence of opioid overdose has continued to escalate despite a number of efforts. Increasing treatment beds, limiting opioid prescriptions, distribution of naloxone and other efforts have not demonstrated a significant impact on non-medical opioid use or on opioid-related deaths.

The continuing rise in opioid overdose and overdose death has resulted in the declaration by the current executive administration of the opioid epidemic as a “Public Health Emergency”.

Medication assisted treatment (MAT) with agents such as methadone or buprenorphine/naloxone has been demonstrated to be one of the more effective measures in the reduction in high-risk opioid use among individuals with substance abuse disorder. Specifically, treatment with buprenorphine/naloxone has demonstrated efficacy in harm reduction with the advantage of a reduced potential for abuse, a safer therapeutic profile than alternatives, and it can be safely prescribed in the outpatient setting. Use of this therapeutic however, is currently restricted to only certain licensed providers in certain clinical settings, limiting access to this important life-saving intervention.

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pills

What is in America’s Medicine Cabinet? Everything.

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There were 240 million opioid prescriptions in the U.S. in 2016, a number that accounts for about 30 percent of the world’s opioid prescriptions, and is enough for one opioid prescription for every adult American.

Experts believe the overprescribing of opioids is at least somewhat responsible for the current opioid crisis. This led to a national discussion around prescribing stewardship, as well as the development of policy and regulation with regard to opioid prescribing. Included among this have been limits on the duration of therapy, partial fills, and requirements that providers access their state’s prescription monitoring program before prescribing. These policies have had some success and there has been a decline in the number of opioid prescriptions in the last several years.

This should be good news, but unfortunately, opioids aren’t the only thing filling America’s medicine cabinets. Looking again at 2016, there were more than 190,000 kilos of amphetamines, drugs like Adderall and Ritalin, produced for consumption in the United States. The estimates are that about 16 million adults and more than 3.5 million children are taking these stimulants.

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border patrol truck

The Intersection of Human Trafficking and Immigration

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57,000.

That is the appalling number of individuals estimated to be involved in human trafficking in the United States, and it is more than likely a relatively conservative estimate.

Even more appalling is that there are approximately 50 million people who are victims of human trafficking worldwide. This is an industry driven by sex, with 80 percent of trafficked individuals engaged in sex trafficking of some form.

Woman account for about 80 percent of individuals involved in sex-trafficking, with some estimates stating that a quarter of these cases involve minor children. The average age for females at the time of entry into sex-trafficking is thought to be between 17–19 years old.

Victims of both sex and labor trafficking include United States citizens, but also many foreign nationals, mostly from Mexico, Central and South America, as well as the Caribbean. Now more than ever, these victims of a horrific crime are at significant risk, not just from their traffickers but from something else that can cause significant harm: the fear of deportation.

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image of pills spilling out of pill box

Prescription Monitoring Programs: HIPAA, Cybersecurity and Privacy

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By Stephen P. Wood

Privacy, especially as it relates to healthcare and protecting sensitive medical information, is an important issue. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, better know as HIPAA, is a legislative action that helps to safeguard personal medical information. This protection is afforded to individuals by the Privacy Rule, which dictates who can access an individual’s medical records, and the Security Rule, which ensures that electronic medical records are protected.

Access to someone’s healthcare records by a medical provider typically requires a direct health care-related relationship with the patient in question. For example, if you have a regular doctor, that doctor can access your medical records. Similarly, if you call your doctor’s office off-hours, the covering doctor, whom may have no prior relationship with you, may similarly access these records. The same holds true if you go to the emergency department or see a specialist. No provider should be accessing protected information however, without a medical need.

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Hepatitis C Virus Infection: Another Consequence of the Opioid Epidemic

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By Stephen P. Wood

And increase in diagnosis of the hepatitis C virus increase goes hand in hand with the opioid epidemic. (Zerbor/Thinkstock)

The opioid epidemic and the toll it is taking is on American lives has resulted in the declaration of a public health emergency by the Trump administration.

There were 42,000 deaths from suspected opioid overdose in 2016, more than in any previous year to date. These deaths illuminate the direct impact of the epidemic, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. Hepatitis C is another epidemic that goes increasingly hand-in-hand with the opioid crisis, and is likely to take a long-term toll on American lives as well. Intravenous drug use accounts for approximately 80 percent of new cases of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection in the United States, and without intervention these numbers could continue to climb. Read More