More Addiction Training at Stanford Med School as Opioid Epidemic Surges

Jonathan Goodman can recall most of the lectures he's attended at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He can recite detailed instructions given more than a year ago about how to conduct a physical.

But at the end of his second year, the 27-year-old M.D.-Ph.D. student could not remember any class dedicated to addiction medicine. Then he recalled skipping class months earlier. Reviewing his syllabus, he realized he had missed the sole lecture dedicated to that topic.

“I wasn't tested on it,” Goodman says, with a note of surprise.

Americans are overdosing on opioids such as heroin and prescribed painkillers at epidemic rates, and the nation's doctors appear to be inadequately prepared to help.

The problem begins in medical school.

A report in 2012 by The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse revealed that medical schools devoted little time to teaching addiction medicine — only a few hours over the course of four years. Since then, the number of Americans overdosing from prescribed opioids has surpassed 14,000 per year, quadrupling from 1999 to 2014.

But Stanford's medical school may offer an example of what faculty-driven change in teaching about addiction can look like.

The school began retooling its curriculum after the director of its addiction medicine fellowship, Dr. Anna Lembke, expressed concern about its meager offerings in that field.

Lectures on addiction will no longer be folded into the psychiatry series as a side note, but instead will be presented as a separate unit relevant to future doctors in any subspecialty, Lembke says. And that training will continue when the students leave the classrooms for clinical rotations.

“We're at the very bottom of a very long uphill road,” says Lembke, who gave the lecture Read More ...

Source:: Health