I'm Jade Malcho, I am a board certified emergency physician and board certified in addiction medicine. Patients that come to the emergency department who have opioid use disorder that have gotten to the point of wanting to seek treatment for opioid withdrawal, ended up coming to us for one reason or another in probably their worst day and they didn't know where else to go. And I think sometimes for emergency physicians we get frustrated, but we still see patients all the time who are an opioid withdrawal because these patients literally feel like they're dying. But when they feel so terrible and it's the weekend or it's the middle of the night and they really don't wanna use, they come to us and they wanna stop or something switched in their brain.
And then at that particular point in time they made a decision and they came to you. And you have the ability to be there at a critical moment to change their life. And if you meet them where they're at, at that point you can do that. Time is always in the back of our mind as a precious resource, and it doesn't always take that much time to take care of these patients but the small amount of time you spend with them, just make sure that it's...
Impactful in a way that is gonna leave them feeling like a human.
Jade, an emergency physician certified in addiction medicine, expresses the opportunity to make a difference. “You have the ability to be there at a critical moment to change [a patient’s] life,” she says. “And if you meet them where they are, you can do that.”
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