Prescription drug abuse is an epidemic nationwide and in Ky.

Prescription pain medicine overdoses now kill more people in the U.S. than heroin and cocaine combined, with 40 Americans dying every day from painkiller abuse.

"This stems from a few irresponsible doctors," said Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "The problem is more from them than from drug pushers on street corners." One California study found 3 percent of doctors wrote 62 percent of painkiller prescriptions, reports Daniel J. DeNoon of WebMD Health News.

Prescription-drug abuse has tripled since 1999, with 1 in 20 U.S. adults admitting to taking the drugs for pleasure rather than need. According to the CDC, the drugs most abused are Vicodin (hydrocodone), OxyContin (oxycodone), Opana (oxymorphone) and methadone. In 2010, pharmacies sold enough of those drugs, and ones similar to them, "to give everyone in the U.S. a typical 5-milligram dose of hydrocodone every four hours for one month," DeNoon reports.

Abuse is more common in men than women; in rural than urban areas; in non-Hispanic whites than in other races or ethnicities; and in middle-age adults than younger or older adults.

The problem has grown to epidemic proportions in Kentucky, with more people dying from prescription drug overdoses than car accidents, The Courier-Journal reported in February. Much of the problem stems from Florida, which until September did not have a drug-monitoring system in place. Dealers from Kentucky would drive down to the Sunshine State and obtain prescriptions from several doctors at a time. They would then return to Kentucky to sell their haul. While a tracking system is now in place, there continues to be loopholes in Florida's law and the fear is pill mill operators will move to other states.

Frieden said states need to monitor who is prescribing the drugs; prevent doctor shopping; make prescriptions available for just three days of use at a time; and have doctors resort to narcotics only as a the last measure to control pain. "We are in an epidemic of prescription drug abuse," Frieden said. "This epidemic can be stopped."

In Kentucky, an effort has been launched to target "drug dealers in white coats" and involves a plan designed to root out doctors with suspicious prescription practices and pass legislation to better track prescriptions.

U.S. "drug czar" Gil Kerlikowske, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said the White House has a goal of cutting down on prescription drug abuse by 15 percent by 2015. Kerlikowske visited Kentucky and adjoining states in February to assess the problem. (Read more)

Study finds doctors often overestimate how well they communicate in English as a second langauge

A study appearing in Health Services Research shows physicians who speak English as a second language, an increasing phenomenon in the U.S. and parts of Kentucky, often overrate how well they are communicating with patients.

The finding is the result of a language scale adopted by the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, which rates language proficiency in five levels: poor, fair, good, very good and excellent.

After the new scale was introduced in 2009, out of four of physicians who participated changed their rating. Of the 258 participants, 31 who had considered themselves "fluent" downgraded to "good" or "fair." Just 11 percent deemed their proficiency "excellent." "Seventeen percent used 'very good' and 38 percent said they were 'fair,'" reports Glenda Fauntleroy of research-reporting service Newswise. "Being 'fair' was defined as 'can get the gist of most everyday conversations but has difficulty communicating about health care concepts.'"

"This is a very tricky area as this demonstrates how many providers overestimate their proficiency in another language," said Joseph Betancourt, director of the Disparities Solutions Center at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. "This can lead to miscommunication and even medical errors." (Read more)

UK surgeons first to do life-saving lung procedures in tandem

Surgeons at the University of Kentucky are the first in medical history to perform two procedures in tandem to bridge a lung transplantation. The procedures were performed first on Wanda Craig, 68, who is now the oldest person to be "bridged to transplant using an artificial lung device, also known as an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation," reports research-reporting service Newswise. (Photo of Wanda Craig and Dr. Enrique Diaz by Julia Meador)

Craig, of Lexington, had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and emphysema for which she has been treated for the past 10 years. In November 2010, she took a turn for the worse. "I was so out of breath from walking to the kitchen ... I didn't have enough energy to even scoop ice cream out of the carton," she said. Pulmonary hypertension, from which she also suffered, had caused the right half of her heart to fail, which prevented blood from going through the lungs to fill the left side of the heart, explained Dr. Charles Hoopes, director of UK's heart and lung transplant program.

To fix the problem, Hoopes and Dr. Enrique Diaz, the program's medical director, performed a procedure called an atrial septostomy, in which a small hole is created between the upper two chambers of the heart. This procedure, along with the extracorporeal membrane oxygenation procedure, saved Craig's life, the news release says. "These procedures are novel in terms of a bridge to transplantation, and the use of an artificial lung together with an atrial septostomy for cases of respiratory and right ventricular failure have not been performed together until now," Diaz said.

Three days later, Craig underwent a double lung transplant, and has been healing since. "More than anything I am looking forward to doing those normal everyday things like going to the grocery store and watching my grandson's T-ball games," she said. "And scooping my own ice cream." (Read more)