Frank Yurasek
Cook County Health and Hospital System, USA
Title: How the growing use of acupuncture for pain relief is bridging the intersection of the drug overdose crisis in the USA on one hand, and on the other, the expansion of the integrated medicine model
Biography
Biography: Frank Yurasek
Abstract
On a trip to West Virginia late last Fall, President Obama underscored reports that: 120 Americans were dying daily from drug overdoses, most of them involving legal prescription drugs; statistics from 2012, showed that enough painkiller prescriptions were written to supply a bottle of them to every American. Recently, the Center for Disease Control noted that 7,000 Americans a day are treated in emergency rooms for drug overdose. In January 2015, in the peer reviewed journal Practical Pain Management, Dr. Forest Tennant, MD, DPH wrote an Editorial “Acknowledging the Failure of Standard Pain Treatment”, citing the recently published “Lange Medical Diagnosis and Treatment 2015”. Shannon Brownlee’s book Overtreated- Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, is based on significant research by a Dartmouth Physician looking at how geography influences healthcare in the USA. Contemporaneously, The Bravewell Collaborative published a study in 2012 of the top 38 hospitals in the USA, who were offering integrated care utilizing massage, acupuncture, and chiropractic, in that order of utilization. In a teleconference entitled “Whose running the circus? The optimization of Integrated Medicine”, a panel from The Center for Optimal Integration discussed patient-centered care that was effective, efficient (not just in outcomes, but also process), and equitable (Accessible). On a personal note, with the addition of acupuncture at the Pain Clinic of Stroger Hospital, Cook County Health and Hospital System in 2011, the second largest public hospital, treating over 700,000 outpatients a year, has been evolving a model of care that moves from a vertical, silo approach housed in separate departments of specialized care, to a longitudinal model of collaboration, with dynamic interplay between caregivers sharing a common mission along a continuum of caring.