NORFOLK — Most of the heroin addicts Dr. Ben Fickenscher has treated in the emergency room weren’t looking to get high on drugs.
Many just wanted a remedy for pain.
“We have to look at this as a health crisis, rather than a problem of a few, poor sorry individuals,” the Chesapeake emergency room doctor told an auditorium of law enforcement, local health officials and medical professionals during Thursday’s meeting of the Hampton Roads Heroin Working Group.
Fickenscher said 80 percent of heroin users started out using opioid pain medication prescribed to them, their family or friends. When prescriptions run out, people turn to heroin — a cheaper, potent street drug — and become addicted, officials have said.
The group meets quarterly to discuss ways to tackle the opioid crisis locally. Thursday’s meeting at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk focused on how doctors can be compassionate to patients in pain without it ending in addiction.
“We need to treat people’s pain. They should not suffer,” the doctor said. “The question we’re looking at right now: ‘How are we going to prevent the cycle from beginning?'”
Roughly a year ago, the Centers for Disease Control issued sweeping opioid-prescribing guidelines for primary care and other physicians to address the overdoses and deaths from opioid painkillers. In March, the Virginia Board of Medicine adopted new prescription guidelines, directing physicians to prescribe opioid pain medications for shorter periods of time and to prescribe naloxone, a drug used to counter overdoses, to patients using them for any extended period.
The new guidelines also tell physicians to try to use non-opioid alternatives to manage pain, such as physical therapy and to check a statewide system that lists patients’ 12-month prescription history before prescribing.
Dr. Heidi A. Kulberg, health director with the Virginia Department of Health, said drugs like naloxone fight overdoses by blocking or reversing the effects of opioid medication, including extreme drowsiness, slowed breathing and loss of consciousness.
In the first nine months of 2016, Virginia had more overdose deaths, 822, than it had in all of 2015 — 811 deaths, the state health department reported. According to the CDC, 40 people die from opioid overdoses every day in the United States.
Canty can be reached by phone at 757-247-4832.
