1-3-20 opioid crisis

MILWAUKEE (AP) — Dr. Angela Gatzke-Plamann didn’t fully grasp her community’s opioid crisis until one desperate patient called on a Friday afternoon in 2016.  Gaztke-Plamann says “He was in complete crisis because he was admitting that he had lost control of his use of opioids.”   The patient in Necedah had used opioids for several years for what Gatzke-Plamann called “a very painful condition.”   In many ways, rural communities like Necedah have become the face of the nation’s opioid epidemic. Drug overdose deaths are more common in rural areas than in urban ones. And rural doctors prescribe opioids more often by far, despite a nationwide decline in prescribing rates since 2012. Meanwhile, rural Americans have fewer alternatives to treat their very real pain, and they disproportionately lack access to effective addiction medication such as buprenorphine.  For rural physicians like Gatzke-Plamann, the burden of responding to the opioid epidemic falls on their already-loaded shoulders.