Helping Babies: Perinatal Addiction in the Opioid Epidemic
Dr. Alison Holmes, pediatric hospitalist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, did not expect to work in perinatal addiction. “I had no interest in addiction,” Dr. Holmes admits.
Dr. Alison Holmes, pediatric hospitalist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, did not expect to work in perinatal addiction. “I had no interest in addiction,” Dr. Holmes admits.
In 2006, Daisy Goodman first experienced a patient disclosing a narcotics addiction. A certified nurse midwife working in obstetrics, Goodman had had years of experience working with pregnant mothers to cultivate a healthy pregnancy and birth.
As another ACA repeal looms in the near future — after ACHA and BCRA — the Graham-Cassidy-Heller-Johnson (Graham-Cassidy) legislation makes me think back to a patient I took care of a few months ago.
Mr. W is an elderly man currently enrolled in French classes, hoping that he will become more functionally independent as he improves. He frequently commented about forgetting what he would learn in class, explaining that his mind always wanders back to his family members who are now scattered everywhere and also back to Syria, the place that he once called home.
We are in agreement. A robust and intellectual discussion of health care reform requires knowledge of the factors in play. Yet, we are deeply troubled by the simplicity and lack of nuance in a number of your arguments. Here are some our responses.
On the first day of my neonatology elective I met Aaron, a one-day-old infant born to a mother with a history of intravenous drug abuse. The mother was reportedly attending a methadone clinic during her pregnancy to address her opioid addiction, but her urine drug screen was positive for fentanyl.
they are / people first / more than just numbers and / statistics on a computer screen
The future of American health care remains uncertain. It was only a few weeks ago that the Affordable Care Act narrowly evaded the congressional guillotine a mere seven years after its installation.
She approached me and said, “Can I tell you something?” As we drifted slightly away from the cluster of white coats that I had previously stood with, she stated, “I just wanted to say that I’m so proud of you.”
Outside apartment 13C the street is empty. It is early in the morning, and yet sounds echo from the metal shop beside the lake, roosters crow, and the children upstairs patter back and forth across the tiles. I roll up my yoga mat, shaking dead cockroaches from its rubbery bottom. Through the grated windows I catch a glimpse of Lake Victoria, shimmering out from the cluttered shore of shanties and deconstructed docks to eventually blend with the blue of the morning sky.
In the spirit of the year of realizing things, I’m starting to think that the med school struggle of knowing/doing/being enough never actually ends. Even as physicians, the problem of “enough” persists, albeit in a form less easily remedied by additional time spent reading First Aid or viewing Pathoma.
With the future of the Affordable Care Act uncertain under President Trump, many Americans are left worrying how they will manage without health care. The Americans who must shoulder this burden are disproportionately people of color. It should come as no surprise to those familiar with the history of health care in this country that once again our system, purportedly built to protect and promote health, is systematically ignoring the right to health care for communities of color.