Recently, the mainstream media have reported on the growing problem of prescription drug abuse and addiction. The news tends to focus more on statistics than the deeper issues of who these patients are, how they go about feeding their addiction, or— most importantly—what the medical profession can do to curb the trend and ensure substance abusers get the help they need.

Our cover article this month, Prescription Drug Abuse and the Drug-Seeking Patient (page 11), by Marcelina Behnam, MD and Mark Rogers, MD looks at this issue from an urgent care perspective, offering tips on how to identify drug seekers, the best ways to deflect their attempts to gain illicit prescriptions, and an explanation of why they view acute care settings as ripe for the picking.

In addition to being the medical director of the urgent care facility, Dr. Rogers is an assistant professor for the Department of Emergency Medicine at West Virginia University. He also has a particular interest in drug abuse and addiction management in the urgent care and emergency department settings.

Dr. Behnam is a second-year resident in the Department of Emergency Medicine at WVU, having previously attended the University of Virginia School of Medicine. She has an avid interest in international medicine.

Looking beyond the surface of a patient’s presenting complaint is also the subject of the latest installment of Bouncebacks (page 23) by Michael B. Weinstock, MD and Ryan Longstreth, MD, FACEP. The subject is a patient who presented to an emergency department with acute back pain. That’s common enough, but the ultimate diagnosis might surprise you, and was overlooked during the patient’s first visit to the ED.

Drs. Weinstock and Longstreth are colleagues at Mt. Carmel St. Ann’s Emergency Department in Columbus, OH. In addition, Dr. Weinstock is clinical assistant professor of emergency medicine at The Ohio State University College of Medicine.

In addition, Nahum Kovalski, BSc, MDCM reviews new abstracts highly relevant to your practice (page 29); David Stern, MD, CPC answers coding questions posed by JUCM readers (page 31); John Shufeldt, MD, JD, MBA, FACEP discusses issues, legal and otherwise, that prevent some startup practices from succeeding (page 33); and Frank Leone, MBA, MPH offers advice on how to use a clinic visit to close the deal with a new occupational medicine client (page 34).

At press time, Drs. Rogers, Weinstock, Stern, and Shufeldt, as well as Mr. Leone, were all scheduled to participate in the recently completed UCAOA National Convention in New Orleans. In addition, Dr. Stern and Mr. Leone will present a program entitled Urgent Care: 40 Ways to Increase Profitability on July 25 in Tampa, FL and July 26 in Boca Raton, FL. For more information on that program, call 1-800-666-7926, extension 13.

If you have an idea for an article, or thoughts about an article you’ve read in this issue, send an e-mail to Editor-in-Chief Lee A. Resnick, MD at editor@jucm.com. Your participation will help us ensure that JUCM continues to presents topics of high interest to urgent care practitioners in an urgent care voice.

JUCM, The Journal of Urgent Care Medicine encourages you to submit articles in support of our goal to provide practical, uptodate clinical and practice management information to our readers — the nation’s urgent care clinicians. Articles submitted for publication in JUCM should provide practical advice, dealing with clinical and practice management problems commonly encountered in day-to-day practice.

Manuscripts on clinical or practice management topics should be 2,600–3,200 words in length, plus tables, figures, pictures, and references. Articles that are longer than this will, in most cases, need to be cut during editing.

We prefer submissions by e-mail, sent as Word file attachments (with tables created in Word, in multicolumn format) to editor@jucm.com. The first page should include the title of the article, author names in the order they are to appear, and the name, address, and contact information (mailing address, phone, fax, e-mail) for each author.

Before submitting, we recommend reading “Instructions for Authors,” available here.

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