Addiction Infectious Diseases

A lot of people have been working on the fentanyl problem for a few years now. There are different strategies that can be taken and different ones work for different people. Here are some of the options that are used most often.

So let’s say you are sold on wanting to stop or even just cut back on your use of opioids. You want to get on medications to help. You don’t think methadone is a good fit for you so you try buprenorphine. And you feel AWFUL. It goes TERRIBLY. WHAT GIVES? And NOW WHAT?!

‘You are just trading one drug for another’ is a common refrain in the world of substance use disorders. Remember that addiction is not defined by WHAT you use but HOW you use and what the use does to your life and the life of your loved ones.

Patients frequently refuse to take medications that are proven most effective for treating addiction because they fear they are simply ‘trading one drug for another’. Let us now have an overview about how the medications work and how they differ from the drugs people tend to become addicted to.

Patients frequently refuse to take medications that are proven most effective for treating addiction because they fear they are simply ‘trading one drug for another’. Here is why that is not the case.

There are many arguments in academic circles about how to frame and think about addiction. In my personal experience, I find one of the most helpful ways to think of addiction is the classic framework that views addiction as a ‘biopsychosocial’ disease. I like this framework because it helps us identify and then examine all of the key ingredients that go into forming and maintaining a substance use disorder. That then provides us with multiple different paths to treatment.

Serratia marcescens is a gram-negative bacillus that is widespread in the environment and has been recognized as a rare cause of infective endocarditis (IE), particularly in persons who inject drugs (PWID). The literature consists of a 19 person case series in the 1970s followed by just a handful of case reports and small case series. At AHWFB (Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist), we have noticed an increasing number of severe infections, including IE, with Serratia marcescens in PWID. We aimed to gather data on the population that is getting this infection, the clinical characteristics of the infection, and its treatment at our facility.

What does infectious diseases have to do with addiction!? How did you get into this?