Ah, yes. Hello. Hello, everyone. This is Matt with the Curbsiders. And this week we have two great episodes on addiction medicine with a particular focus on opioid use disorder and patients with chronic pain.

This is a topic that has really been a struggle for me in both clinic and on the hospital wards.

So I think we got some great information from our two wonderful experts. Definitely some of the topics here are going to be controversial.

We'd love to hear your feedback on how you're handling these situations when you see them. I hope you enjoy both of these wonderful episodes. The second one will come out on Friday. Thanks for listening.

Thank you so much for watching.

Welcome back to the Curbsiders. Hello, Matthew. Hi. This is this is the internal medicine podcast that uses expert interviews to bring you critical pearls and practice changing knowledge. I'm Dr. Matthew Wato here with my two co-hosts. Dr. Stewart can't bring them. I figured I had to introduce myself this time. Yeah. And Dr. Paul Williams.

It's like it's 14 or 15 Bible sized books. I've read all of them. Great. Yes. I know. That'll be the next. My next step in self-cladulation. But I think the pick I'm going to make this week for no one to look at will be actually a collection of TS Elliott poems. So everyone knows quotes by TS Elliott. But the one poem, the love song of J. Alfred Proofrock is probably my favorite piece of American literature.

Hopefully is American otherwise I look foolish. But how about we say English language. And it's one of my favorite things I think that I've ever read. But it's all of his works have posts that you've heard. So I'm going to recommend the collected works of TS Elliott specifically the Wasteland Proofrock and other observations is a nice book that actually has some good annotation. So recent poetry, class yourself up a little bit. Wonderful.

And my pick of the week will be very quick. It is another podcast, an internal medicine podcast. Actually, it's the hospital and internal medicine podcast by Gil Perot. And he did a recent episode, which relates to this episode we're doing now on urine drug screens false positive urine drug screens. And some of the stigmatization that that can cause for patients and some of the conflict that can cause between you and the patient. And he talks about what can cause false positives.

It's about a 20 minute listen. It's it's it's good. I recommend it. So check that out. Excellent. All right. This episode is on first of two episodes that will be doing on addiction medicine, specifically this one's focusing on opioid dependence and opioid therapy. It's a controversial topic. And we had two great speakers. Dr. Stefan Cortese. He's a physician and internal medicine and addiction medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School.

He's a school of medicine and also at the Birmingham VA Medical Center. He grew up in California. He has a 20 year history of providing and research of providing and researching health care services for vulnerable populations.

He leads a VA funded research on homeless health care and housing. He serves on his hospitals opioids safety initiative and has written several articles for scholarly and lay press on problems in our current response to the opioid crisis with a focus on the harm to patients.

He was recently invited to the center for Medicare and Medicaid services at an upcoming opioid summit. So he was invited there as an advisor.

And Dr. AJ Mann-Hapra is the interpreter of maladies at advanced packed pain clinic at the VA Hampton Medical Center in Hampton, Virginia. He is an internist and ABAM fellowship trained addiction medicine specialist.

He is a research scientist attached to the VA New England MIREC and Yale Department of Psychiatry. His clinical focus is on developing a cognitive paradigm for primary care physicians to conceptualize the problem of disabling chronic pain and individuals.

Especially those with complex dependence and addiction to various substances. The goal is to shift the high quality treatment of complex pain to primary care because the current specialist centered model is apparently not working.

And he is a member of the local pain committee and pain team and was a member of the Virginia governor's task force on pain and addiction curriculum development.

He also teaches pain and addiction topics at the Eastern Virginia Medical School. We are so happy to feature both of these great speakers.

We talk about the treatment of chronic pain or acute pain with opioids. We talk about tapering off opioids for people who have been on them chronically, some of the controversy around the CDC guidelines, nooxone therapy, and some of the partial agonists like methadone and suboxone and how those can be used.

It is a very informative discussion. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

That is right Matt. Hey Matt, you know what I heard about the opioid use epidemic?

What?

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