Welcome to Helix Talk, an educational podcast for healthcare students and providers covering real-life clinical pearls, professional pharmacy topics, and drug therapy discussions.

This podcast is provided by pharmacists and faculty members at Rosal Franklin University College of Pharmacy.

This podcast contains general information for educational purposes only. This is not professional

advice and should not be used in lieu of obtaining advice from a qualified health care provider.

And now on to the show.

Welcome to Helix Talk episode 68. I'm your co-host Dr. Kane. I'm Dr. Schumann. And I'm Dr.

Patel.

And if you haven't heard already, we have an audio upgrade courtesy of our dean, Dr. Mark Abel.

We really appreciate his support and helping us come up with new equipment to help Helix Talk sound as good as it possibly can.

So thank you very much.

All right.

So today I'm really excited to introduce Helix Talk episode number 68, hooked on a feeling. How to discuss benzodiazepine tapers with

your patients. Now, Dr. Schumann, I can't emphasize enough how important of a topic this is.

As we'll talk about benzodiazepines are incredibly common. Patients can become dependent on them. And one common

clinical conundrum is, how do you get off of these benzodiazepines? So I'm really excited to hear

your personal practice and some background on the topic. So this is something that we, it's come up

a number of times in our facility, as well as overall nationwide as a concern. And so in this episode, we're going to talk about the current state of benzodiazepine use,

expected trends in prescribing both currently and in the future, as well as risk associated with use.

And then lastly, we'll discuss techniques for ensuring a benzodiazepine taper is performed in a safe manner with the lowest risk of harm.

And something tells me that we didn't arrive to that stage just because, you know,

I think there's some historical content to it and I think our audience will appreciate if you can go over that a little bit too.

Certainly.

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