Social stigma makes the opioid crisis hard to confront (7min) There are many reasons why the opioid crisis is so hard to confront. One of them is social stigma. It often extends beyond users themselves, to their families. People see addiction as a moral weakness, and by extension, the moral weakness of their families.
When drinking ruins your liver - should you qualify for a transplant? When patients develop alcohol liver disease, they are often forced to wait 6 months to prove they can abstain from alcohol before they will be considered for a transplant. Is that a fair amount of time? Is that a fair practice at all?
Withholding surgery: How gaps in policy fail people who inject drugs A recent New York Times article described a harrowing situation faced by some people who inject drugs and develop endocarditis, a life-threatening infection caused by bacteria that enter the bloodstream and settle in the heart. The article described doctors in Tennessee deciding whether to perform repeat costly heart surgeries on patients who were re-infected with endocarditis as a result of ongoing illicit drug use—and at times declining to operate. There are policy failures that are to blame, too, for how and why resources are allocated this way. This looks at those failures and how our bias influences both the policies and how they are applied.
Injecting Drugs can ruin a heart - how many second chances should a user get? A life-threatening heart infection afflicts a growing number of people who inject opioids or meth. Costly surgery can fix it, but the addiction often goes unaddressed.
The Fix (whole episode - 43min) This episode we take a sober look at the throbbing, aching, craving desire states that return people (again and again) to the object of their addiction … and the pills that just might set them free.
NPR: Becoming Mindful of Medical Decision Making Do you strive to know every detail of your disease and embrace every therapy available, or do you prefer to ignore symptoms and advice from the medical community? Drs. Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband frame medical decision making into two camps- doubters and believers.
NPR: Becoming Mindful of Medical Decision Making Do you strive to know every detail of your disease and embrace every therapy available, or do you prefer to ignore symptoms and advice from the medical community? Drs. Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband frame medical decision making into two camps- doubters and believers.