By ANISH KOKA, MD

No one knows who Bennie Solis is anymore.

He had the misfortune of being born in the early 1960s marked for death. He had a rare peculiar condition called biliary atresia – a disease defined by the absence of a conduit for bile to travel from his liver to his intestinal tract. Bile acid produced in the liver normally travels to the intestines much like water from a spring travels via ever larger channels to eventually empty into the ocean. Bile produced in the liver with no where to go dams up in the liver and starts to destroy it.

That the liver is a hardy organ was a fact known to the ancient Greeks who told the tale of the punishment given to the god Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods. Chained to a mountain, an eagle would feast on his liver by day. The liver would regenerate by night to allow the eagle a full meal on its return making this a truly eternal punishment.

So it is that the poisoned human liver remarkably continues to function to allow beautiful appearing normal children to be born. It would make the eventual discovery of the disease all the more painful. How could that beautiful child harbor something so black inside?

When Bennie was born, every child with his condition had one fate. Death.

And it did not come slowly. As the liver becomes progressively damaged and scarred, the flow of blood through the liver is impeded. The obstructed blood, seeking a way to return to the heart, travels through collateral channels. These vessels, normally minute and invisible in the esophagus and the stomach, now become engorged and thin walled and prone to rupture. Complicating matters even further, the body lacks clotting factors that were normally synthesized by the liver, giving blood the consistency of water. The horrors only multiply. Blood pours from the mouth and rectum when vessels rupture, free fluid fills the abdominal cavity, the lack of bile in the intestine means fat isn’t absorbed, and the body starves. When death mercifully does intervene, it arrives as the liver completely loses its ability to manage toxins, sending the children into a coma.

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By NIRAN AL-AGBA, MD

Newborns born in 29 other countries of the world have life expectancies exceeding 80 years; yet, an infant born in the US in 2016 is expected to live only 78.6 years according to recently released statistics. While death rates fell for 7 of the 10 biggest killers, such as cancer and heart disease, they climbed for the under-65 crowd. The irrefutable culprit is the unrelenting opioid epidemic.

Last year life expectancy declined for the first time since 1993. The last two-year decline was in 1962 and 1963, more than a half-century ago. I predicted (accurately) it would decline again this year unless there was a dramatic change in the primary care physician workforce. We are dying at a younger age today than two years ago– two months earlier to be exact. It might not sound monumental, but life expectancy is the king of noteworthy health statistics, making it quite significant in the grand scheme.

In the past, epidemics by definition were temporary; the narcotic epidemic will be anything but transient; there is no foreseeable end for the scourge of opioid addiction sweeping the nation. In my humble opinion, the solution to this dilemma is no different than it was last year, we must correct the primary care physician shortage. Time is of the essence. The last three-year decline occurred in 1912- 1914 as a result of the Spanish flu. Unfortunately, life expectancy will continue to decline until the nation makes comprehensive changes.

One in five Americans live in a primary care shortage area; the ratio of the population to primary care providers is greater than 2,000 to 1 (Bodenheimer & Pham, 2010), when it should be closer to 1,000 to 1. I am a third-generation primary care physician, with a unique historical perspective on how medical practice has changed since my grandfather made house calls back in 1940.   My practice is currently located in a shortage area and the difference in volume compared to 16 years ago when I first hung a shingle, is extraordinary. Only 37% of doctors serve in primary care, yet 56% of the office visits are completed by that particular group of physicians (Health Resources and Services Administration, Bureau of Health Professions, 2008.) In my grandfathers’ time, primary care physicians made up 70-80% of the physician workforce.

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By MICHAEL TURPIN

For veterans of the healthcare industry, the current debate over the future of the Affordable Care Act – and proposed changes that would fundamentally alter Medicaid and individual market exchanges – is a frustrating battle of ideologies with the future of healthcare at risk. Our debate over who should be eligible for expanded coverage and how we reform reimbursement is often laced with self-preservation, which in our case means preserving an employer-sponsored system that is riddled with inequities, opacity, dubious middlemen and weak public and private sector fiduciary oversight. Those who provide, pay for and/or consume healthcare are drowning under rising per capita costs while many in the middle of these transactions grow fat.

As brokers, consultants and advisors, we have to face an inconvenient truth: we have presided over and benefited from a system in crisis. Not everyone believes our industry’s purpose is noble or necessary.

Health system stakeholders long to deal direct with employers. Many professional benefits managers hate being on the end of the latest pitch from their advisor  to sell a project or broker to hawk a new product to increase commission income. In the digital age, there is a heavy bias in favor of disintermediation and the elimination of distribution costs that are often not easily rationalized.

How does one grade the contribution of a sentinel? How does a client know whether the advisor who is paid a commission or fee is acting out of self-interest or as a trusted change agent?

How one makes money is as important as how much one makes in certain industries. There are ethical implications to anyone who adds cost to a healthcare system fraught with waste, fraud and abuse. This expense translates into higher cost and erodes the ability for employers and public entities to finance care for those that are often most in need.

In the last two decades, ineffective regulatory and advisory oversight of the financial and healthcare industries has allowed abuses to take place in the form of mergers and protected opacity in pricing.

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By HANS DUVEFELT, MD

“I made myself a hypodermic injection of a triple dose of morphia and sank down on the couch in my consulting-room….I told her I was all right, all I wanted was twenty-four hours’ sleep, she was not to disturb me unless the house was on fire.”
– Axel Munthe, MD, The Story of San Michele (1929)

When people in this country mention the opioid epidemic, most of the time it is in the context of addiction with its ensuing criminality and social deprivation, and the focus is on opioids’ medical complications like withdrawal, overdose and death.

But that is only one of the opioid epidemics we have. Far greater is the epidemic of largely compliant patients who take their modest three or four daily doses of opiates for pain that was originally described as physical, but which in many cases is at least as much psychological – not imagined, in fact often quite severe, but nevertheless without a physical explanation or available cure.

Stimulation of opioid mu-receptors in the central nervous system induces euphoria more reliably than it reduces pain. In fact low dose opiates have been shown to sometimes lower pain thresholds but at the same time allowing dissociation from the pain experience.

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By KAREN SIBERT, MD

Just say No to Fentanyl.

No, I’m not talking about putting fentanyl into my own veins — a remarkably bad idea. I’m questioning the habitual, reflex use of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, in clinical anesthesiology practice.

I’ve been teaching clinical anesthesiology, supervising residents and medical students, in the operating rooms of academic hospitals for the past 18 years. Anesthesiology residents often ask if I “like” fentanyl, wanting to know if we’ll plan to use it in an upcoming case. My response always is, “I don’t have emotional relationships with drugs. They are tools in our toolbox, to be used as appropriate.”

But I will say that my enthusiasm for using fentanyl in the operating room, as a component of routine, non-cardiac anesthesia, has rapidly waned. In fact, I think it has been months since I’ve given a patient fentanyl at all.

Here’s why.

What is fentanyl?

Fentanyl is an opioid pain-killer in the same class as morphine or Demerol, meaning that it acts on the same receptors in the brain to lessen the subjective experience of pain. It appeared on the market in 1960, and quickly gained wide use in anesthesia practice.

Fentanyl is potent and works fast, which makes it very effective in treating the intense stimulus of surgical pain, and its peak effect lasts only a short time. It’s also inexpensive, which makes it attractive in an era of cost containment in healthcare.

When I started my anesthesia residency, we assumed that since fentanyl’s analgesic and euphoric effects were so brief, short-term exposure to the drug wouldn’t increase a patient’s risk of long-term narcotic abuse. For the first few years, fentanyl was kept in unsecured medication carts in the operating rooms along with Benadryl, lidocaine, and other commonly used medications.

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