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 said, with a note of surprise.
Americans are overdosing at epidemic rates on opioids such as heroin and prescribed painkillers, and the nation’s doctors are inadequately prepared to help, according to some public health experts. They say the shortfall 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 four years. Since then, the number of Americans overdosing from prescribed opioids has surpassed 14,000 per year, quadrupling from 1999 to 2014.
Schools have been so slow to change that some medical students, like the ones at Harvard University, have started conducting their own training on how to buy and administer drugs that reverse the effects of an overdose, according to Kelly Thibert, the national president of the American Medical Student Association. The students organized to educate themselves about these medications because it was not part of the school’s curriculum.
[For more of this story, written by Natalie Jacewicz, go to http://californiahealthline.or...ors-about-addiction/]
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