Category: Meds

The truth behind opioid use disorder

Anyone reading health care news today must be aware that American medicine – particularly pain medicine – is in crisis. Doctors are experiencing high levels of burnout due to administrative burdens, prior authorization demands, and a health care system…

Are rapid weight loss drugs hiding the real obesity problem?

According to some academics, in 2019, a ban on junk food advertising across London’s entire public transport network—foods and drinks high in fat and salt and ads for foods–resulted in the prevention of 100,000 obesity cases. Yet the U.S. love af…

Are you storing your medications wrong?

Today, I want to talk about how creative humans are. As physicians, we encounter patients with ideas that amaze us every day and make our lives interesting, to say the least. The best ones are often the elderly, who have years of experience and unique …

Are Ozempic patients on a slow-moving runaway train?

Have you ever heard of a drug called Ozempic? Just kidding. As we all know, this medicine and numerous related drugs are the rage. It is classified as a GLP-1 drug. The percentage of my patients who are taking these drugs is steadily rising. Of course,…

How weight loss drugs are creating a medical dilemma

On my outpatient clinical rotations last year, I saw ample management of heart disease and smoking cessation counseling. I also saw the annual physicals and checkups. But what surprised me was how many patients were on medications that were just now be…

To anesthetize, or not to anesthetize: a pervasive dilemma of the GLP-1 era

Since the United States Food and Drug Administration approved exenatide in 2005, it took decades for the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) to identify and address perioperative safety concerns, if any, among patients using glucagon-like pepti…

Why doctors risk jail time to treat pain and addiction

This is a strange time in America. While tools for treating pain and addiction, unchanged essentially from the late 1800s to the early 2000s, are now being developed, daring to try to utilize these medications and the science we have learned about them…

Transforming liver care: the evolution of MASH diagnosis and treatment

The term “revolutionary” is used too often in health care. New imaging modalities, pharmaceutical breakthroughs, advanced medical devices, and artificial intelligence are all regularly proclaimed to be revolutionary to attract interest and …

Transforming liver care: the evolution of MASH diagnosis and treatment

The term “revolutionary” is used too often in health care. New imaging modalities, pharmaceutical breakthroughs, advanced medical devices, and artificial intelligence are all regularly proclaimed to be revolutionary to attract interest and …

The DEA’s latest targets: doctors treating addiction instead of pain

I have been writing for a while about how the DEA will run out of targets for opioid prosecutions because most doctors are too terrified to treat pain, and now it looks like it has happened. Three doctors in Tennessee were recently convicted of prescri…