This changed my practice
Can We Identify Patients at Risk for Opioid Use Disorder when Beginning Opioid Analgesics for Pain from New or Ongoing Non-cancer Causes?
There is growing recognition that opioid prescribing can lead to prescription opioid use disorder (OUD). It is estimated that nearly 115,000 British Columbians have become addicted to opioids. There is a need to safely reduce the volume of new opioid prescriptions for opioid naïve patients. read more…
Male Pain and Alcohol
Pain is a universal experience across people of all genders. How do we know when something hurts inside? It keeps coming back; first, it disrupts, then colors all aspects of everyday life. There are many shades of emotional hurt that can be emotionally crippling. Anger, grief and jealousy – are all hurtful emotional states. They are experienced and can be a part of our life for years. How we manage these painful experiences as men can be a challenge. While recent studies suggest sexes don’t feel pain the same way, the evidence on sex differences in pain is mixed and potential biopsychosocial factors may play a role. To read the full text please visit Dr Matt Modrcin’s blog
Moving on: helping young people
In this 2009 Insight article, Gemma Turner, Cobh Community Based Drugs Worker, provides a brief history of the project while Jano Klimas gives a sense of the impact of the youth initiative from its evaluation.
Expanding opioid agonist therapy while learning from HIV/AIDS
Accessing opioid agonist therapy (OAT) and maintaining good adherence faces many barriers which can be geographical, financial, regulatory, situational or logistic. This post elaborates on the ideas from a recent freely-available commentary published in the journal Addiction.
Eight years joining CPDD drug problems conference
Some things in academia can become so much fabric of your life that you stop counting years. The conference of the College on Problems of Drug Dependence (CPDD) is one of those things. With the 2020 conference coming up soon, this blog summarises my annotated posters presented over eight years. (more…)