Tag Archives: Sarah Ziegenhorn

Short Coat Podcast

Tales from the Clinic: from Theory to Practice

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There is nothing to fear but fear itself.

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Kylie Miller and Issac Schwantes take a break from their fairly new clinical duties to let Gabe Conley and Erik Kneller know how it’s going working with actual patients.  What unexpected things have they learned?  Were their professors really correct when the said that arcane bit of information would actually be useful in the real world?  Were their fears (whatever they were) realized?  Would they rather grandma puke every time they broke wind, or have a shingles outbreak whenever they get a passing grade or better in medical school?  Dave assures them: these are the questions listeners want answers to.

This Week in Medical News

The nation’s largest health insurer, Aetna, wants patients to diagnose themselves and risk huge ER bills if they get it wrong.  We recap the work of our own Sarah Ziegenhorn and her non-profit Iowa Harm Reduction Coalition, which is on the forefront of needle exchange efforts in Iowa.  The DEA is relaxing rules that prevented many healthcare workers from prescribing treatment to opioid addiction sufferers.  And we look at the tiny, cute robots that may one day crawl, tumble, and wiggle around your insides like an over-active inchworm.

We Want to Hear From You

What are your fears for starting the next phase of your education?  Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime, visit our Facebook group, or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.

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Short Coat Podcast

The Modern Opioid Epidemic

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:27 — 61.1MB)

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Close your eyes, and picture an opioid abuser. If you’re like me, you see a man in a flophouse or dark alley. He’s cooking up heroin in a spoon over a lighter. Maybe he has a loop of tubing around his upper arm, and he’s shooting the heroin into a vein in the crook of his elbow. Once he’s done with the injection, he leans back with a euphoric sigh. Fade to black.

Maybe it’s just me, but this is the image that, for years, mediated my perception of the opioid epidemic, but it’s a stereotype created by television and movies. Even as a stereotype, it’s outdated, though. For decades, now, much of the epidemic is one of prescription drugs. The CDC says 78 people die from opioid overdoses every day. At least half of all opioid overdoses are from prescription drugs. Meanwhile, deaths from illegally made opioids, like the synthetic Fentanyl which is often mixed with heroin or cocaine to increase the high, increased 80% from 2013 to 2014. The American Society of Addiction Medicine says that prescription pain reliever overdose deaths among women increased more than 400% from 1999 to 2010, compared to 237% among men. In 2014, 168,000 adolescents were addicted to prescription pain medications. More than 2 and a half times that number of kids were taking prescription pain relievers for non-medical uses.

Next week, from September 26 to September 30, 2016, the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine will host the Opioid Overdose Prevention Summit. Second-years med students Sarah Ziegenhorn, Petra Hahn, and Cameron Foreman helped organize the conference, in which students from the Colleges of Medicine, Dentistry, Pharmacy, Social Work, Public Health, and Nursing will join together to increase their knowledge and to influence public policy and legislation; personal perspectives; and student advocacy. , Sarah, Petra and Cameron were joined by Assistant Dean Denise Martinez and Nurse Kim Brown, whose son Andy died of an overdose, to talk about the issues of opioid addiction, treatment, and overdose prevention.
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