Patrick Marshalek News Today

Medicaid patients are already at disproportionate risk of opioid overdoses, almost four times higher than patients on commercial insurance.

Many Americans stayed away from the emergency room when the nation went under lockdown for fear of contracting COVID-19 at the hospital. While this led to an overall decline in emergency department visits, a recent study shows weekly trips to the ER for drug overdoses were higher in 2020 than in 2019. Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention studied more than 180 million ER visits from Dec. 30, 2018, to Oct. 10, 2020, and found that weekly counts of all drug overdoses we...

Dr. Owen Lander, medical director of the West Virginia University Medicine J.W. Ruby Memorial Hospital Emergency Department, said he has seen an increase in relapses in his emergency room as people with a long period of abstinence don’t recognize their tolerance is much lower. He speculated that more relapses happened as the pandemic temporarily shut down treatment centers, clinics and other resources. Although numerous doctors offices relied on telemedicine to resume daily functions, La...