Week 5: Drugs, Patients, and Doctors
Hello everyone!
Welcome to week 5! Man does time fly. I wasn’t able to get as much done this week as I have spent much of my time sorting out college decisions and working on scholarships. However, things have not come to a complete halt. In the past few days, I have finished up my second neuroscience class, regarding the prescription drug epidemic. If you remember from last week’s post, I mentioned that even good-hearted doctors find themselves contributing to this problem. However, a simple way for doctors to reverse this is to remember the acronym “No HARM”. Here is a snippet from the notes I took.
- No – Notice what you’re feeling: Don’t engage in primitive defense or narcissistic injury.
- H – History, Habits, Heredity: Understand a patient’s history regarding addiction.
- A – Aberrant Behavior: Notice unusual behavior and act accordingly.
- R – Health Risk: Know the health risks associated with opioid use.
- M – Monitor Misuse: Prevent drug misuse from occurring over long periods of time.
While this isn’t entirely related to my senior project, I figured that I should understand my research topic from all sides, especially since I’m working with prescription drugs. Don’t worry, next week I’ll be back with information that is more closely related to my research project.
Just to update you guys on the lab situation, my professor is scheduled to be back in-person in less than two weeks! Since I have already received my first dose (Pfizer), I’m working on getting into the lab as well. Apologies for the short blog post, I’ll catch you guys next week!