What it ’s like to be a doctor in the heroin capitol of the U.S.

I am a practicing hospitalist physician in Dayton, Ohio. Dayton has emerged in the last year as the city with the highest per capita death rate from opioid overdoses. When we measure the number of deaths here we talk about how many there are per day, not per week or month. We have been inundated with heroin and other products laced with fentanyl or carfentanil. Every other drug, including marijuana, is laced with an opiate in this city. Dealers stand on street corners and throw baggies of heroin into passing cars who have the windows open — free of charge — to get new customers hooked. A routine dose of Narcan to revive someone here is not the standard 0.4 mg dose, but a minimum dose of 10 mg. Many people die and cannot be revived despite maximum Narcan doses. Our hospitals are overrun with opioid dependent patients. They take up a staggering amount of the healthcare community’s resources. When you are an IV drug user, there are many acute and chronic medical illnesses that come with it: hepatitis C bacteremia endocarditis abscesses of the skin and bone osteomyelitis pyomyositis rhabdomyolysis And that’s if you are lucky enough to survive an overdose. Many of these conditions take months to treat and will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. In hospitals and clinics in Dayton, the medical community is being tested. We do not have enough resources to help patients get clean. And even if we did, the number of patients who achieve remission then relap...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - Category: General Medicine Authors: Tags: Physician Medications Source Type: blogs