Casting wider net in opioid management
But the medical community, where the problem had its roots with overprescribing of addictive narcotics, still has a long way to go to coordinate care. That is why
As a person in long-term recovery from alcohol and opioid addiction, Kennedy explained how a service such as Axial would have helped him during his 20-year struggle with bipolar disorder, asthma and addiction.
His legislative and personal battle for decent health care, which included seven or eight admissions to residential treatment centers as well as passage of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008, is chronicled in his memoir, "A Common Struggle."
In 2011, Kennedy left
He called it an "allergy" so the nurses and doctors would treat his addiction as such and not give him opioid pain medicine, he said.
But after they dressed the wound, they handed him a bottle of Percocet, he said.
"My addiction dopamine receptors started really going off," Kennedy said.
His "addict brain" began to tell him how he really was in pain and needed those pills. But then his wife arrived and plucked the bottle from his hands.
"That one little wound could have killed me," Kennedy said.
Had that hospital had Axial's technology on hand, Kennedy's history of addiction treatments would have come up on his electronic medical record, Donahue said. Also, the doctors would have gotten information on medicines and treatments for pain that did not involve narcotics.
Medical school students get 100 hours of training on the treatment and diagnosis of pain, Donahue said. They get more education on how to draw blood, he added.
Dr.
"There are 23 million people living in sobriety," Kennedy said. "There needs to be a greater appreciation that these medicines could kill them."
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