Andrew Kolodny: Enemy #1 of All Pain Patients

http://www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2015/survey-many-doctors-misunderstand-key-facets-of-opioid-abuse.html

Many primary care physicians – the top prescribers of prescription pain pills in the United States – don’t understand basic facts about how people may abuse the drugs or how addictive different formulations of the medications can be, new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health research suggests.

This lack of understanding may be contributing to the ongoing epidemic of prescription opioid abuse and addiction in the U.S.

If opioid abuse and addiction is an epidemic, pray tell, what would you call the ever-increasing suicide rate?  More people die from suicide and guns than opioids, and neither of those issues are called epidemics.

Reporting online June 23 in the Clinical Journal of Pain, the researchers found that nearly half of the internists, family physicians and general practitioners surveyed incorrectly thought that abuse-deterrent pills – such as those formulated with physical barriers to prevent their being crushed and snorted or injected – were actually less addictive than their standard counterparts. In fact, the pills are equally addictive…

Another finding from the new research: One-third of the doctors erroneously said they believed that most prescription drug abuse is by means other than swallowing the pills as intended. Numerous studies have shown that the most common route by which drugs of abuse are administered is ingestion, followed by snorting and injection, with the percentage of those ingesting the drugs ranging from 64 percent to 97 percent, depending on the population studied. Certain medications are more likely than others to be snorted or injected…

“Primary Care Physicians and Prescription Opioid Abuse: A National Survey” was written by Catherine S. Hwang, MSPH; Lydia W. Turner, MHS; Stefan P. Kruszewski, MD; Andrew Kolodny, MD; and G. Caleb Alexander, MD, MS…

A World of Pain

http://www.bgsu.edu/news/2015/06/conference-looks-at-history-of-alcohol-and-drug-use.html

The opening session on June 18 will discuss “The Heroin/Opioid Epidemic in Northwest Ohio.” The panel discussion, from 7-9 p.m. in 201A Bowen-Thompson Student Union on BGSU’s campus, is free and open to the public. Panel participants include Dr. Andrew Kolodny, chief medical officer for Phoenix House Foundation in New York and executive director of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescription…

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2015 Summer Conference
Indiana Prosecuting Attorneys Council and Office of Indiana Attorney General

OPIOID EPIDEMIC
Dr. Andrew Kolodny
Chief Medical Officer, Phoenix House
President, Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing
Brooklyn, NY