113 | Dr. David Berry | The ER doctor who overcame opiate addiction | How to care for the addicted and psychiatric patient with empathy

I’d like to welcome to the show Dr. David M. Berry, MD, he is a growing voice in the recovery and addiction space, an area that we deal with a ton across EMS and the emergency departments. He is an Emergency Medicine physician with over two decades of experience.

 You can reach him at [e-mail]

 

We must remember, when working up these patients with addiction, they can have poor health baseline anyway, so they are at higher risk for something emergent to be going on

 

Dr. Berry talks about this approach to opiate OD

 

We have a small window between the ED and definitive care to help addicted patients move forward with treatment – a warm handoff to a treatment center or primary care that can monitor recovery is key

 

We have specific rules for most emergencies but often psychiatry is not on a set system

 

Holds may not always accomplish what we hope they will, it will not force someone to change

But there is certainly a role for the patient who is genuinely suicidal 

 

We talk about good structure of evaluation and treatment of the psychiatric emergencies 

 

David talks about some patients he has been able to help with addiction recovery from his experience

 

Don’t underestimate the difference we can and do make with patients just because we don’t always see the result

 

Dr. Berry talks about the message he has for clinicians:

We deal with a lot of emergencies, people actively dying, so when we hear a psych complaint or substance abuse complaint, we tend to mentally shuffle them into a lower priority. We need to remember to have empathy and take their complaints seriously, slow down with these patients

 

We talk about the balance between empathy and detachment and burnout

 

David talks about some methods of humanizing the experience for your patients and getting them to open up more

 

We talk about anchor bias and how to protect from it

 

David talks about conformation bias and how it relates in piloting an aircraft and emergency medicine

 

A key question to ask before you leave a patient room is “Do you have any questions?” – This can be hard to ask because we often want to move on but it’s so important to the patient

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Everything you hear today from myself and my guests is opinion only and doesn’t represent any organizations or companies that any of us are affiliated with. The stories you hear have been modified to protect patient privacy and any resemblance to real individuals is coincidental. This is for educational and entertainment purposes only and should not be taken as medical advice nor used to diagnose any medical or healthcare conditions.