The opioid epidemic, which has claimed tens of thousands of lives and contributed to a decline in American lifespans, has forced doctors and other medical professionals to reassess policies and practices that have contributed to it.
A feature story in the March-April, 2019 edition of Harvard Magazine profiled several Harvard-affiliated clinicians who are studying the epidemic in hopes that they can stop it. Michael Barnett, assistant professor of health policy and management at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, is among the clinicians featured.
Barnett recalled that a few years ago, when he was a trainee, there was “no evidence and no guidance about how to prescribe these medications.” Barnett’s research on the subject has found that patients treated by a “high-intensity” opioid prescriber were much more likely to transition into long-term opioid use and that measures such as prescription-drug monitoring programs can help cut down on high-risk patterns of prescribing, but none of the methods are a silver bullet.
More recently, Barnett has been studying how barriers to treatment for addiction affect opioid users. “Until treatment is as easy to access as heroin or fentanyl, we can’t really expect to make a dent in this. There’s a population of people out there who, through their genetics and their environment, are going to develop opioid-use disorder. We’re not going to make addiction disappear,” he said.
Read the Harvard Magazine article: The Opioids Emergency
Learn more
Physicians’ opioid prescribing patterns linked to patients’ risk for long-term drug use (Harvard Chan news)
Curbing opioid use disorder by treating it in the doctor’s office (Harvard Chan news)