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While the entire globe has been focused on battling COVID-19, our nation’s ongoing opioid crisis has not disappeared. In fact, it may be worsening. Early data from the Overdose Detection Mapping Application Program, a federally funded national surveillance tool, shows that drug overdoses are increasing during the pandemic, and local medical and law enforcement … [Read more...] about A Guide For Companies That Want To Fight The Stigma Around Opioid Addiction

In an op-ed published in Morning Consult, AMA Immediate Past President Patrice A. Harris, MD, MA, wrote that there remains an urgent need to remove health insurers’ barriers to evidence-based treatment for patients with pain and substance-use disorders, enforcing mental health and substance-use disorder parity, and other actions necessary if the epidemic is going to … [Read more...] about How To Reignite The Fight Against The Nation’s Opioid Epidemic

For opioid drug users, the COVID-19 pandemic adds crisis on top of crisis. Physiologically, opioid users may be more vulnerable to health complications related to COVID-19 because of compromised respiratory and pulmonary health. Socially, since opioid addiction is a disease of isolation, the social isolation under the pandemic may cause people to relapse and increases the risk … [Read more...] about With Over 1,000 Connecticut Deaths Last Year, Opioids Demand Even Greater Attention During Pandemic

Here in Baltimore, Our City of Perpetual Recovery, Steve Dixon and Antoine Kittrell have been through a lot together. They are friends. They are survivors. They have now twice recovered from threats to their lives — first from addiction to heroin and now from the virus that has killed more than 134,000 of our fellow Americans in less than six months. Dixon and Kittrell work … [Read more...] about Two Friends Survive Covid-19 To Return To The Front Lines Of America’s Other Health Crisis | Commentary

Few physicians in the U.S. have taken the training needed to prescribe medication for opioid addiction. Advocates are seeking to change that. For most of their medical care, 169,000 residents of Kenosha County, Wis., don’t have to go far. There are three hospitals and more than 75 primary-care physicians practicing in the county, which fronts Lake Michigan in the … [Read more...] about Opioid-Addiction Treatment Is Limited by Shortage of Authorized Doctors