Julie Craig, MD

Julie Craig is an addiction medicine specialist.

The real story of Xylazine contamination in street fentanyl and how we can manage it

Julie Craig, MD

Medications

May 9, 2023

Have you heard the news?

“Flesh-eating ‘zombie’ drug ‘kills you from the inside out,'” headlines a CNN article.

“Tacoma market busted for selling ‘zombie’ drug,” barks out a Seattle-area news affiliate.

” Zombie drugs? Florida man stabs couple, eats dead man’s face in ‘random’ attack,” shouts a Syracuse news outlet.

Surely by now, you have heard chilling stories about …

Telemedicine in the opioid crisis: a game-changer threatened by DEA regulations

Julie Craig, MD

Medications

March 27, 2023

In March 2020, I was directing a federally qualified health center in rural New Mexico when the first flashover of COVID ripped through the state. In two days, the clinics transitioned from an entirely in-person model to a near-total remote model. The transformation was raw and unplanned, trialing mediocre communications platforms in real-time and stumbling through the vagaries of electronic prescribing. As we got our feet under us, unexpected upsides …

The promises and limits of a fentanyl vaccine

Julie Craig, MD

Medications

December 18, 2022

“Fentanyl Vaccine a Potential ‘Game Changer’ for Opioid Crisis,” declares a Medscape headline.

“Fentanyl Vaccine Delivers Promising Results in Trial,” reports an industry website.

“A Vaccine Against Deadly Fentanyl Might Be Near,” promises US News & World Report.

Only the fourth headline I encounter puts the news into proper perspective: “New Fentanyl Vaccine …

We must disrupt harm

Julie Craig, MD

Medications

August 6, 2022

In the mid-1980s, with the AIDS epidemic on the horizon, austere conservative Margaret Thatcher sanctioned the first needle exchanges in the U.K. to prevent the budgetary burden that HIV might otherwise have become on the National Health Service. Nearly forty years later, New York City opened its first supervised injection sites in November of 2021, where intravenous drug users inject their substances of choice under the watchful eye …

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We must disrupt harm

Allow patients to continue their opioid of choice while starting microdoses of buprenorphine

Julie Craig, MD

Medications

June 16, 2022

Twenty-six hours into the shakes, sweats, crawling anxiety, and gripping nausea of opioid withdrawal, Faye caves in and takes a couple of fentanyl tabs. She knows that she must tough out a couple of days without fentanyl to start Suboxone (buprenorphine/naloxone) through a medication-assisted treatment program, but the sickness gets the better of her. Those couple of tablets reset the clock on her withdrawal.

Starting buprenorphine – an evidence-based …

The complications of drug regulation

Julie Craig, MD

Medications

May 19, 2021

When the “opioid crisis” is mentioned, most people think of heroin, prescription pills like oxycodone, or — more recently — the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl. Fewer people would think of novel opioids like tianeptine, although an increasing number of Americans have taken this substance in the form of over-the-counter supplements like ZaZaRed or Tianna – often without knowing that the substance has opioid properties that can cause dependence and overdose. …

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The complications of drug regulation

The confusing policy surrounding the buprenorphine X-waiver

Julie Craig, MD

Medications

March 18, 2021

In the waning days of the Trump administration, a surprising announcement came down from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that the barrier required to write buprenorphine prescriptions for opioid use disorder would be lifted via reform of the so-called “X-waiver.”

The X-waiver is a rare regulation in American medicine that requires an 8-hour training and documented DEA permission before a medical doctor can prescribe Suboxone to …

Merging the wisdom of pain medicine and addiction medicine to optimize outcomes

Julie Craig, MD

Medications

January 16, 2021

Family lore recalls that my grandfather, succumbing to stomach cancer in the mid-1960s, “died addicted to morphine.” Decades before the AIDS crisis sparked the hospice and palliative care movements, the confluences of pain, dependence, and addiction were confused and regrettably moralized. Since then, the science has excelled, but our clinical understanding of how pain and addiction intertwine remains limited by stigma, assumptions, and the separation of the underlying science …

Telemedicine reduces the stigma in substance use disorder patients

Julie Craig, MD

Physician

December 16, 2020

“The patient is 15 minutes late. Can you still see her?”

“He missed an appointment yesterday because the bus ran late, and he’s out of Suboxone. He’s getting agitated in the waiting room, and other patients are complaining. Could you see him right away?”

“Therapy group has already started. Is the facilitator willing to let one more patient in?”

In the halcyon days before COVID-19, these questions plagued the …

Market-based approaches solving the opioid epidemic

Julie Craig, MD

Medications

October 17, 2018

Mary first took oxycodone after a minor surgery and found she liked it. Returning to her surgeon a month later with vague ongoing pain, she received another prescription. Her primary care provider took over from there — until one day that physician checked a urine drug screen and a prescription monitoring program (PMP) report, only to find that she was obtaining various opioids from several providers. The physician cut her …

The alarmist approach to medical errors solves nothing

Julie Craig, MD

Physician

May 30, 2016

The British Medical Journal recently published a paper boasting the astonishing conclusion that medical error is the third leading cause of death in the United States. Headlines aside, the study suffers from questionable statistics that serve up alarmist conclusions about the prevalence of serious medical errors and obscure the road to addressing the tragic phenomenon of death by medical error.

The analysis cites four observational studies on incidents that occurred …

The lies in the doctor-patient relationship

Julie Craig, MD

Physician

May 3, 2014

People lie. Patients lie. Patients tell blank untruths, patients misunderstand truth, patients confabulate with the damage of a thousand fifths of vodka of yesteryear.

A core conceit of medicine posits that health care providers expect pure honesty from patients from first handshake on. Violating every social norm around encounters with strangers, we expect that patients with no grounds for trust reveal all.

Providing primary care to patients on the furthest margins of …

Stopping prescription drug abuse starts with primary care

Julie Craig, MD

Physician

February 18, 2013

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As with any disease, prevalence of this narcotics abuse is region-specific; an hour north of the office where I practice, Rio Arriba County in New Mexico is home to one of the highest opioid overdose rates in America – up to five times higher than the national average. Our patients routinely lose family to addictions; our clinic has been home to a …

Customer service has limits in the exam room

Julie Craig, MD

Physician

July 3, 2012

Health reform includes measures to link hospital reimbursement to patient satisfaction measures. Through both public and private insurers, this trend is likely to spill over into the outpatient setting in the very near future.

Aside from creating redundancy in the market (with some very rural exceptions, patients can act as agents of their own satisfaction by voting with their feet), there are serious limits to physicians as agents of pure …

Julie Craig, MD

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